It was 6:45 in the morning.
And YES, we were already at the lab to have LK's blood drawn!
The last few times we've had blood drawn we needed to do it before she took her morning dose of medicine - which happens at 7 a.m.
Thankfully, though our doctor is about 1.5 hours away, we're able to go to a lab here to have blood drawn...and the lab is only about 10 minutes away from our house.
Jas normally leaves for work between 6 and 6:30 a.m., but on these days he stays home with some sleeping children while I take LK and one other child (they're taking turns). Lily Kay really loves having one other child go with us...and they love it too! Makes them feel special that they get to go when others are still at home asleep.
AND the whole process is made easier because we're still using that miracle EMLA cream (that I talked about here) on LK's arms where they're going to stick...so it doesn't even hurt her! The cream has to be on there for at least an hour before she's stuck. Jas and I have it down to a science now: as soon as we get up (at 5 a.m.) we go into LK and Elisabeth's room with the cream and some already-cut-and-ready cling wrap. I get on one side of LK's bed and pull up her jammie sleeves and squeeze on the medicine, he wraps up her arm, and we pull the sleeve back up and kiss her and tell her to go back to sleep! LK is so used to this routine now that when we both show up at her bedside while it's still dark out...she just holds her arms up! We didn't even wake up Elisabeth last time we did it - are we good or what!?
We've become buddies with all the women that work in the lab. They're good at what they do, and very good with my children....both of which I greatly appreciate! In this picture above, LK did not need that much bandage wrapped around her stick site...but she wanted it, so of course Mrs. Deneen was happy to oblige! And, of course, there are always stickers at the end of the ordeal - yay!
Some of Lily Kay's levels were where they needed to be and some were a little wonky...so we ended up having blood draws twice in one month. But now everything is where it should be...so we're still on for her surgery on the 27th of this month.
I'm not sure, but I think my lab setup is better then your lab setup. We were fairly frequent visitors of the local lab for a while; but we have "cute lab boy". I use to write about him a lot because he looked about 15 yrs, but was the best at finding veins in little arms that I'd ever seen. Raegan named him "cute lab boy" because he is..well, just pretty cute. All the girls loved to visit him; I guess that's why we never even needed to consider the cream. They just were happy to get cute lab boy's special attention when it was their turn. You could probably sleep a little longer on blood draw mornings if you had your own cute lab boy! :)
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