Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Washed away at Oley

Greetings from the washed out Oley conference in soggy St. Petersburg, FL.

Our first sir travel experience was flawless and the research that Abby did doe a work proved to be spot on for air travel with TPN. A good TSA guy is rare but worth their weight in gold expeciallt at 5AM.


JetBlue. Cable is magic.

The story of the week is rain. Lots of it. Like near record, Led Zeppelin 'When the Levee Breaks' rainfall days- today Tampa got close to 5 inches of rain just today.

Sandbags? Those don't look like FEMA bags..

Glad we remembered the raincoats on the way out the door. Really glad that we brought sunscreen from home instead of forking over all that $$ for stuff we won't really use. We have still managed to get outsode every now and then but it has been pretty soggy:


Oley has been a good trip. Abby is here for work with NutriThrive and is officially a member of this year's Oley faculty since she gave a talk about how to navigate through a short bowel clinic appointment.

Since Ellie had no interest in the Oley daycare, it has been a Gib and Ellie travelling circus for two days. Which has been great since Ellie is the best partner in crime short of her Mom. We have been everywhere together this week and she has been just wonderful.

I even took her to the hotel bar tonight to get my first beer of the trip tonight . I stopped short of letting her order for me but was really tempted to let her ask "Sam Summer, Pwease!" Ah, good old family values.

Even without seeing a lot of talks we had a great time seeing families of kids with short bowel and other digestive issues including afew that we had corresponded with for a long time before meeting this week. Seeing Ellie run around with 2-3 other kids with backpacks was good to see and in the future it will be good for her to know other kids with similar equipment even if their diagnoses are much different.

We hope the weather gets better tomorrow. We are taking the plunge and bringing Ellie to see Cinderella at Disney until Saturday when we fly home. Seeing all of these kids made us realize that despite her progress things are still quite uncertain for Ellie and we need to seize this opportunity.

Besides, think of the look on her face when she sees her cast of princesses? we'll be sure to take lots of pictures.




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember the last picture with 30 toes. You've all come a long way, baby. Don't forget It's A Small World, over and over and over again.

Sarah Thomas, Nora's mom said...

Glad you all had a good time at Oley despite the rain. Even though it didn't make for good beach weather, I'm thinking Mother Nature knew best for all of those kiddos at risk of dehydration and gave everyone a break from the 100 degree temps we've been having in FL.
We really hated that we couldn't be there to finally meet you all in person, hopefully next year's conference will work out for our super short bowel girls to meet. :) Can't wait to see the Disney pics!