A day of relaxation
After last night’s frightening escapade in the ER, we took the doctor’s advice to heart and gave Namine a pajama day. Having gotten to bed waaay past her bedtime, she slept until sometime past 10 this morning.
When she awoke, she said her head hurt significantly less. Her back, however, was killing her. (That’s a direct quote.) We thought it best to call Dr. Black, Namine’s orthopedic surgeon and bone specialist. He’s closely monitored her scoliosis, so we felt that he ought to examine her. We have an appointment to see him next week; in the meantime, the ER has sent him the results of her scans from last night.
As the day went on, Namine said the pain in her back receded. She got some Motrin in the afternoon, but by evening she had the pain under control and did not request any for the rest of the night.
BLTs
We had been planning on making BLTs for some time, but circumstances being what they were, we didn’t have the chance. Tonight, though, I fried bacon and popped a couple baguettes into the oven while Jessica ran to the store for lettuce and tomatoes.
iSACRA Cake
When we made our cake the other night, we started out planning to just make a dual-layer cake. We had two boxes, one vanilla and one chocolate. We had all the ingredients, plus some extra almond and vanilla extracts, and one more thing: heavy cream to thicken up the batter. As it turned out, it thickened it a lot more than we anticipated.
The heavy cream increased the volume of the batter so much that only half of the batter would fit in our two round cake pans. So we got out our two largest cupcake trays (I’m not exactly sure what you’re supposed to use the square one for, but it works well for cupcakes) and filled them up too.
Our original plan was to make a kind of zebra stripe pattern with the cake (kind of like we did for Namine’s birthday), but the batter was too thick for that. We tried swirling a toothpick in the cupcakes, but that just made a mess. Whatever, I think they still turned out all right.
When the cake had cooled enough, Jessica put some white frosting on. I thought that it needed some kind of decoration, so I drew the iSACRA awareness ribbon with our frosting gun.
The organization name of iSACRA is an acronym: International Sacral Agenesis/Caudal Regression Association. Caudal regression syndrome and sacral agenesis are fairly interchangeable terms, meaning, essentially, that the lower half of the body did not form properly. Namine was born with CRS; it’s why she can’t walk without assistance.
Burgundy represents adults with disabilities. Silver represents children with disabilities. Zebra stripes represent rare genetic conditions.
I drew the ribbon from memory, so I mistakenly put the zebra stripe on the opposite side of the ribbon. It should have been on the same side, just on the other half. For the red on the ribbon — being colorblind, I wasn’t even going to attempt to make burgundy-colored frosting — I used sprinkles. Once we cut the cake, they’re going to go everywhere. But as far as decorations go, I think it all turned out rather nicely.
Tonight we finally got to have some of our delicious cake. (We are definitely using heavy cream next time, too. The white cake tasted like angel food cake!) We each took a bite before I cut us up some pieces.
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