Happy Birthday to Parker's Battle with ADA

I just realised when I cut pasted the article into blog from notepad that I started the blog the day Parker enter isolation last year. It was 365 days ago today. I wanted to thank everyone over the past year who as visited our site. One of our major goals is to get people informed about Parker's disease and how promising gene therapy can be not only for Parker's disease but so many other. 130, 000 hits in the past year is definitely getting the word out. I hope you enjoy today's article.

It is the start of a new week here. It is hard to think that it has been almost seven days since we arrived. So far it has been very good; mostly because Parker has not had to have any major procedures done.

We did take a trip to the hospital today but only for his ADAGEN injection. Mondays and Thursdays Parker gets his injection. This will stop about three weeks before the procedure to starts. At least we won't have to worry about Parker getting injections the rest of his life if this works.

The last time I wrote was on Saturday morning and quite a lot has happened since then. Alot in the sense that over 24 hours have passed in our new surroundings and there is alot to write about as a result.

We found out on Saturday evening that everything is closed in Italy on Sundays, as a result we would have to make sure that we got all of our groceries on Saturday that we would need for Sunday. Of course that meant some salami, cheese and bread for lunch, for dinner on Sunday we decided we would have pizza.

I do apologise that I did not take any pictures of the pizza and calzone that we had but do trust me they were very good. Believe it or not we got our pizza at the Chinese restorante attached to the residence. Yes, you heard me correctly. Apparently, it is a Chinese food and pizzaria in one. I was very surprised that pizza from a Chinese restaurant could taste so good. It was of course very thin crust with very fresh ingredients. My wife ordered a pizza with pomodoro, mozzarella, and funghi, I ordered a calzone with pomodoro, mozzarella and prosciutto. In addition, we ordered a rice gnocci dish off the Chinese food menu. They consisted of thinly sliced gnocci with sliced vegetables. Absolutely incredible. Now, the only problem that occurred with the pizza is that we were unaware that the afternoon hours for the restaurant began at 7:00pm. Yes, people have dinner much later here in Italy so at 5pm we went back to the room and waited for a couple of hours to pass so we could grab our dinner and bring it home. To be honest, I did not mind eating that late. Parker on the other hand needed to be fed a little sooner than that.

For the most part, we spent the day walking around Milano Due. That is the name of the suburb that we live in. In consists of several different residences separated by parks, trees and walkways. Very beautiful. I took an image of a map of Milano Due in hopes that it would help us locate different places we needed to go. Unfortunately, it is a very general map that contains mostly the names of the different apartments. As a result, we used the day to walk through as much of Milano Due so that we could have a better understanding of where everything is located.

We of course stopped so that I could have a caffe. While I was inside get my shot of espresso Parker and mommy hung around outside. Mommy even took a few snapshots while I was inside.

Parker absolutely loves the scenery here. On our little adventure we located a soccer pitch where a games was being played. Parker, his mommy and I stopped to watch for a bit before we continued on with our trek.

Most of the residences contain stores below them. Unes, the grocery store we go to is located in one of them. Yesterday we located a store that was actually open and sold baby toys for the bath. We left Parker's bath toys at home so the poor little monkey is quite bored in the tub since mommy does not let him splash around. Parker did enjoy his bath quite a bit more yesterday.

I do have more that I could write about but I think I will save it for tomorrow. Ciao!