Today is the final installment in my weeklong celebration of Type 1 Diabetes Awareness Day: Live With It!

I've begun to suspect lately that Penny is beginning to edge out of her honeymoon period -- it's been harder to keep her in range, these last few weeks, and we've had lots more highs than lows. It may be another few weeks before the doctor recommends putting her back on the basal insulin, but I doubt it'll be more than a month. Of course, that may necessitate some changes to her insulin-to-carb ratios, and we may make some other changes to our routines to account for it, like making all of Penny's afternoon snacks low-carb, so that her school can resume afternoon testing, after her snack (instead of before, which was generating unnecessary panic due to her weird post-nap spikes).

In the beginning, we didn't so much as twitch from the prescribed routine without talking to the doctor first. Now, as we're beginning to get the hang of it all, we're a little more confident about making small adjustments here and there to account for unusual circumstances.

Penny spent an hour before dinner running around in the yard like crazy with Ray from next door? Reduce the after-dinner insulin dose, and keep a close watch on her through the night. Birthday party at school? Plan on having to add a corrective dose to the dinnertime shot.

But these are the day-to-day changes that Matt and I are learning to make, and that Penny will learn to make as she grows with this disease. We try not to make a big deal out of it, at least not where she can notice. After all, we don't want her to be Penny the Diabetic. We want her to be Penny the Superhero, or Penny the Big Sister, or Penny the Princess Fairy. Penny the Student is on the horizon, and one day, we hope (both further in the future than we can imagine, and far too close for comfort), Penny the Lover and Penny the Wife and Penny the Mother and Penny the Whatever-Career-She-Chooses.

So far, I think we're doing pretty well.

Would you notice the Med-Alert tag on her wrist if I didn't point it out to you? (Go on, go look at the last few months of our photo album and see if you spot it. I had to work to get it in this picture!)

Would you believe that cute pink bag contains almost all her diabetes gear?

The book fits in there, too. And there's room left over for, say, a cell phone -- though by the time she's old enough for a cell phone, she'll probably want a different bag.

Heck, at the rate the technology is improving, maybe by the time she's old enough for a cell phone of her own, continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps will be merging into a single device -- the promising beginnings of an artificial pancreas.

And then she won't just be living with it. She can be living. With it.

I know that most of my regular readers have already heard most of this from me and Matt. I know that some of you were seriously widged out by some of it (sorry about the needles, Karen). But I wanted to support the Awareness initiative, and -- more than that -- I think it helped me to organize my own thoughts about Penny's diabetes, some, to get this all documented and diagrammed.

Understand, most of this was crammed into my head in the space of about 48 hours, while she was in the hospital and I was caring for a five-week-old baby, and then I went back to work only a few weeks later. This is the first time I've actually sat down and gone over the whole shebang at one time, laid out the puzzle pieces and tried to explain it in some fashion that actually makes sense as a whole.

So next week, I'll be back to the usual chitchat journal entries. Have a great weekend, and I'll see you then!