New Year's Cookies

Monday two of my former students from Northland came over to make "New Year's" cookies with Jake and me. Molly is a freshman at UT and Chelsea is a freshman at Case Western in Ohio and they were still in town for Christmas break. Originally they were going to come over to make Christmas cookies, but we got postponed due to the surgery. The beauty of New Year's cookies is they can be whatever you want them to be! I have a plethora of cookie cutters so we made a wide assortment and had a great day catching up. Jake ate his first sugar cookie ever and he was definitely a fan as you can tell from his picture. We even made Gilbert a cookie or two so he was pretty excited as well.

Jake update: Jake had an appointment with Dr. Grenier yesterday and he came home with a great report. He held amazingly still for both his EKG and Echo and smiled at the doctor and all of the nurses. The really great news is there is absolutely no regurgitation from Jake's mitral valve. After surgery there was still a little more than they would have liked, but Dr. Grenier didn't see any at all yesterday. His right ventricle is also shrinking down to more of a normal size. Because his heart is decreasing in size, Dr. Grenier was actually able to find that Jake has another tiny hole in his heart. She suspected that it was there before surgery which means instead of having a partial AV/Canal defect, Jake has a complete AV/Canal defect. During surgery, Dr. Heinle did not see the hole and did not think it was present. Dr. Grenier says it is so small that it would be almost impossible to detect during surgery since there would have been no blood flowing. She says this is completely harmless for Jake and will NOT require surgery or even medication. It just means he will always have a slight heart murmur. He has been on two heart medications since last May. We will slowly stop one medication over the next two weeks and he will just stay on the other for another few months. We will go back again in one month for one more echo and then Jake will just have to go to the cardiologist once a year for check-ups. At the end of the visit, she told us to take our "normal" kid home. What a wonderful phrase! She said she just wants us to keep him in the house for two more weeks and then we can rejoin the world and Jake can be around others again. In the meantime, thank God for the wonderful weather in Houston. Jake and I took a great walk today and enjoyed the outdoors.