Final Hospital Update, Pioneer Day, and Halloween, Oh My!

Sorry for the lack of updates.  Two days after I wrote my last post, on October 22, Josiah was released from the hospital.  He was moved out of the PICU on Monday and went home about 24 hours later.  We were so happy to leave and join the family back together.  I really can’t say enough good things about the hospital and all the support we got from our community of friends and family.  I plan to write another post about that soon but haven’t had the chance to put my thoughts on paper yet.

In the meantime, even though Josiah was still very weak when we left he was looking so much better.  He was able to join his class for Pioneer Day which made us all so happy.  It’s a day of reenacting pioneer life which they have been learning about the last two months.  It included washing with a wash tub, calf roping, making wooden Jacob’s ladder toys, making bead necklaces, learning how to dry apples, panning for gold, making possible bags in a teepee, animal trapping, and on and on.   It was lovely to see how happy his classmates were to finally see him.  They were overjoyed that their prayers had been answered and that Josiah was healed.

Another thing that worked out wonderfully was a friend let us borrow the boots and shirt for the day since we didn’t have anything for him.  As soon as we left the hospital we stopped by the thrift store that was down the street but I couldn’t find anything….you might be surprised to hear that if you’re not from Texas…you’d think that is all that anyone wears around here.  The friend and her son just happened to be trying to visit us at the hospital not knowing we were already discharged so we met them at the thrift store for a bit since they had made the drive all the way to Austin.  It was so nice knowing that I didn’t have to spend the next day running around town trying to find an outfit for him to wear.  Definitely a God send there.  Oh, and the boys all made “coon” skin caps in class and the girls made bonnets to wear on this day.  Josiah had just started his in class the day before he got sick so thankfully it was the right size and his teacher just finished it for him.

He rested at home the rest of the week though and went back to school on the following Monday.  His teacher recommended that he leave early the next few days to take a nap since he was still really dragging.  By Wednesday though he was starting to look a lot better so we thought that maybe Thursday (Halloween) he’d be up for staying the whole day.  And as luck would have it, we had a huge rain storm in central Texas that flooded a lot of areas including ours.  School was cancelled which was good because we couldn’t have gotten there anyway.   There is only one road out to the area where a lot of us live just outside of town.  And if there is ever a huge rainstorm like there was then we can get stuck because you have to drive through a couple low water crossings.   Texas has been in drought conditions for years now so even when we have had a lot of rain it gets soaked up pretty fast, but this was a crazy amount rain in a very short time and so there just wasn’t anywhere for the rain to go.  Today was the first day that there wasn’t water on the road.   And we’re actually supposed to get more rain this week, so we’ll see if we get stuck again.

We were determined to get out for Halloween though.  I worked too hard on their costumes to not have them get worn.  I had to drive through scary water to get there, but I was determined.  Our church does a fall festival every year as an outreach to the community and so that is where we go.  Here’s a look at what they looked like that evening.  I am going to write on each of their costumes this week with a lot more pictures and explanations as to how I made them in case you need some inspiration for next year.  Josiah’s costume almost didn’t get finished because of the flood but I’ll tell more about that when I share his costume details.  And in case you’re wondering what they are, we have Tinkerbell, Peter Pan, and Megatron.