Fantastic news this week! At our hematology appointment, we found out Zeeke's platelet count is now 396! That's up from 4 at diagnosis and the high side of normal. They want to do another blood test next month to confirm, but it looks like Zeeke might be over his ITP.
Zeeke is still obsessed with the notion of family (doing things as a family, which groups of people and animals are a family, what roles different family members play, etc.). He's been using the phrase "every day" a lot the past few weeks, usually to describe things he wants to do more of ("I like to eat strawberries every day") or in some cases to convince us that he's being deprived of something that other people get ("Lettie has peanut butter candy cakes every day").
The fears keep coming. He likes the Grinch, but is terrified of the Whos down in Whoville. He gets paralyzed with fear if he so much as looks in the direction of our Salvador Dali biography which has a picture of the artist on the spine (it still evokes a reaction even after we turned it around). One fear that's been slowly building over the past couple months is drawings of open mouths. Even when he asks us to draw them, he'll soon frantically scribble over the open mouths to close them. If he sees one on TV, he hides his face.
Thursday night, Steve & Zeeke joined several of his classmates at the lighting of the neighborhood Christmas tree.
Friday, Zeeke got a present in the mail from our friend Colleen: a celebratory stuffed platelet!
Saturday was cold and rainy so it was the perfect time to decorate our Christmas tree. Zeeke loved and immediately became possessive ("It's not your tree, it's OUR tree.") After we showed him some ornaments he made last year, he became convinced that he made all of the tree's ornaments, holding them up one by one and asking, "When did I make this?"
Sunday, we went to a Christmas/Anniversary party at David & Steve's. Zeeke was a little overwhelmed by all the people at first, but soon threw himself into consuming the array of fine foods. When he got a little antsy, our friend Lindsay took him out for a walk to show him all the Christmas lights. And a little later, he lobbied for a trip to the park, so we walked around the corner for our first nighttime trip to the playground.