The Plague

Just a quick note to say that I'm skipping "Meal Planning Monday" again for two reasons:

1. I didn't meal plan again this week.  I am so bad at this game.  Sue me!  We have dinner plans on both Wednesday (Dan's work Christmas party so L and the sitter will probably get pizza) and Friday (An Evening With Elves at Marbles, can't. wait.!!!), so I just got lazy with the rest of the week.  Tonight we ate chicken noodle soup that I froze when I made it a few weeks ago and grilled cheese.  The rest of the week is TBD.  :-)
2. This is the more serious excuse reason: my household has come down with a serious plague and I have not had the energy to do anything that I don't absolutely have to do.  L got snotty at some point last week and then started coughing some on Thanksgiving Day.  The cough worsened throughout the weekend and by Sunday Dan and I both felt terrible as well.  L's cough was so bad this morning that we decided to take her to the doctor instead of sending her to school - good decision on our part for sure but it meant that I was home with her all day and she was in what was probably the worst mood I think she's ever been in.  To say it was a long day would be an extreme understatement.  The doc confirmed that L has a nasty cold that has started to move into her chest and ears, so that means an antibiotic and some more breathing treatments for us (And a probiotic since the antibiotic is apparently notorious for causing diarrhea.  So far we've tried to hide the probiotic in both juice and pudding to get her to consume it, but she hasn't liked either, so any suggestions on how to get that in her are welcomed!).  The good news is that we caught it before it moved too far in either direction, and the doc said she shouldn't be contagious since there is no fever, but I spent L's naptime today doing laundry and sanitizing the whole house in an effort to prevent Kinsley from catching whatever nastiness this is in addition to working (which I just finished up for the evening as a result of today's lack of productivity).

Welcome back from vacation, yes?  Check back in tomorrow for Baby Boy's stats (and hopefully a happier and healthier post!).

Sarah

Sick Day

Sweet Lillian Grace had to stay home from school today, and she was so sad about it.

She was running a low-grade fever last night, and really didn't have any other symptoms other than she wouldn't eat and was really lethargic.  She asked to snuggle and laid in my lap for a good hour.  While I was secretly savoring every second of cuddle time, I was so sad that she didn't feel well!  She was the most pitiful little thing.  I gave her medicine, and luckily it worked and brought the fever down within 30 minutes.  

Lilly's fever was gone when she woke up this morning, but I kept her home from school to be safe (the rule is that they shouldn't go to school until their fever is gone for 24 hours without medicine).  She slept fine last night, and still did not have any other symptoms other than the fact that she didn't eat hardly anything today (but she still drank milk and water).  I stayed home with her this morning in an effort to keep the germs as far away from Kinsley (and Carney) as possible, and although her fever was gone I could tell that she still was not feeling 100% - mainly because she spent most of the day on the couch reading books to herself and she never sits still for that long.

Her fever came back this evening but was still very low-grade, around 101.  When I spoke with the nurse last night (we have been fortunate to not have much experience with fevers over the past 20 months so I called to ask at what point I needed to be concerned in case we had a bad night since Dan was out of town) she said that fevers typically spike in the evening so not to be too concerned.  I am hoping that this is just some 24-hour thing and it's not just the beginning of some unknown symptoms to come.  Lilly bean needs to be healthy for our fun beach trip this weekend!

One last thing, I told Dan tonight that I think I learned what it must be like to be in a room (or on a car ride) with myself.  Homegirl talks NON. STOP.  I am not even sure what about, but as long as she was sitting still she wanted to be talking.  Hilarious, that one!  Additionally, she asked to go to school ALL DAY.  I was so sad that she couldn't go (and I'm so glad that she loves it so much!), especially since she'll miss Friday as well due to our travel plans.

I'll leave you with a pitiful (but still cute) snapshot of L's day:

Feel better soon, sweet girl!

Sarah 

HF&M (UGH)

Super quick (pictureless) post tonight (I am beyond exhausted) for some advice!

Lilly's teacher told me this morning when I dropped her off that they have their first confirmed case of hand foot and mouth in the classroom.  For all of my readers who are not mamas, do a google image search.  Nasty stuff.  I can't believe that we are already dealing with this and it's only the second week of school!  Obviously I know that Lilly is going to get sick and we can't avoid it forever, but I would really like to avoid this one if possible because I have heard it's pretty miserable on sweet kiddos.  The disease has already made it through the other toddler classroom and 3 children out of 8 got it, so hopefully our odds of contracting it are low, but I am not trying to take chances.

I asked Carney to immediately change Lilly's clothes and wash her hands when she got home from school before nap (she did one better and gave her a bath too for good measure, best ever).  We gave her a new lovey, and after her nap I stripped all of her bed clothes and took the new lovey and have been washing them ever since.  Other than keeping her hands as clean as possible (I'm extra worried since she sucks her thumb), is there anything else I can do to try to keep this at bay?  Do any of my mom friends have experience with it?  Dan's first thought was to keep her home this week instead of sending her to school, but I feel like that seems a little drastic.  As I mentioned above, I am not delusional and I know we are going to deal with more sickness this year than we have previously, but I wasn't prepared to do so this early on!

That's all for me.  I have several posts to write this week, hopefully I can get around to doing so  but I have yet another week at work where I'm slammed so we'll see.  Happy Monday!

Sarah

Weekend Roundup

I realize it's Tuesday and weekend roundups are typically written on Sunday night, but honestly the way this week has gone already it feels like it's Sunday all over again.  Does that make sense?  Maybe not.

Anyway, we spent this past weekend at home and it was glorious.  I think I've mentioned before that I had big decorating plans for our house when we bought it, but shortly after moving in and buying a few necessary pieces of furniture, we found out I was pregnant and all of our time and energy went to all things baby.  Poor, neglected house!  One of our new years' resolutions was to go room by room giving face lifts (within reason), and to not move on to another room until the room we started was how we wanted it (at least for the time being).  We have so many small projects that we want to complete that otherwise we'd be overwhelmed!  Not major projects, mind you, since our home was (thankfully) new construction, but little things here and there (which are time consuming and add up, from a cost standpoint).  The room we decided to tackle first (over the weekend) was the dining room.  I'll dedicate a separate post to before and after photos (we still need a few small finishing touches!), but here are a few sneak peaks of our progress, in case you care (I'm so excited/proud of the end result that I can't wait to share it!).

Side note: painting/face lifting your house is a serious chore with a little babe.  I was exhausted at the end of the weekend!  Here is the break down (with photos!) of how we got it all done:

Friday: Getting my supplies ready.

Color samples on the wall.  In case you care, we went with "O" on the ceiling and "F" on the walls.

 Friday night, after L went to bed, we taped the room and ceiling.

The tray ceiling was a real b-word, if you're pickin' up what I'm puttin' down.

Saturday during L's morning nap, we painted the ceiling.  We painted the walls during her afternoon nap.

Saturday during the afternoon nap: almost done!

Our reward.

Dan and Layla relaxing and admiring our handiwork.

Layla was not amused by the painting.

Saturday night, after L went to bed, we touched the paint up.  

Finished (paint) product.

We spent Sunday accessorizing some (took a trip to the mall to pick out a curtain rod, ironed the curtains and hung them, hung the new chandelier, moved the furniture back in, etc.).  Glamorous weekend, eh?  Seriously though, even though we were tired we both really enjoyed working on a project together and not killing each other in the process, and we felt like we had a super productive weekend when it was all said and done.

That's all of the sneak peaks I'll give you for now, but the finished product will be well worth the wait I can assure you.  It looks like a whole new room - it's amazing what some paint and a few accessories can do!  Shout out to my bestie Sheila for all of her advice.  Y'all should check her out, she's fab.  

 

In other exciting news, we got some snow over the weekend!  Remember when it snowed iced around L's birthday and she seemed to be amused by it?  Wellll let's just say that was NOT the case this time around.  This time, we got some actual snow.  It snowed in big, thick, beautiful flakes, and it snowed for a few hours.  It was actually perfect, because it accumulated some but then melted before it could cause too much damage.  Anyway, L really liked admiring it from inside:

...so you can understand why I was super excited to take her outside to see what she thought.  At first I thought she'd be ok...

...until she wasn't.  Oops.

Does the fact that I love this photo make me a bad mother?

Dear Lilly, I hate to be a mean Mommy, but you're gonna have to suck it up because there are a lot of winter mountain trips in your future.  :-)

In unrelated news, thanks to everyone who has been checking in our sweet girl.  The breathing treatments that we have been giving her appeared to make L's cough slightly better, but as of Monday morning the cough was still pretty terrible, and still in her chest.  Considering the cough is over two weeks old now, and she was pretty pitiful in general, I decided to take her back to the doctor just to check on things.

My poor sick baby :-(

Honestly, throughout this whole ordeal L hasn't really acted much different for the  most part (aside from the obvious runny nose and hacking up a lung every 2 minutes).  She's been fussy at times, her appetite has been diminished and she's slept a lot more, but to be as sick as she is, she's still been pretty happy.  Anyway, I'm glad I took her back to the doctor because as I suspected, the sickness progressed.  Whatever she had has turned into a bacterial infection that is basically just festering (Dr. V's word) in her chest.  Dr. V said she hesitates to call it pneumonia, but that that's what it is - albeit a mild case.  She also has a very mild ear infection (I wondered about this because she fought nap time and bed time some over the weekend.  I could tell she was tired but she would stand up in her crib and fuss and lay her head on the crib, still standing up.  She normally doesn't fight naps/bed so I was sure she didn't feel well!).  So, we've added an antibiotic to the mix (in addition to the breathing treatments), and we're heading back to the doctor on Thursday to check in and make sure it's working.  I guess the good news is that L only really fought me on breathing treatments for 2 days...now she'll sit still in my lap like a good girl and take them like a champ.  The even better news is that I can already tell a difference in her cough and general demeanor since she started the antibiotics, so fingers crossed that it means she's on the mend!

So I guess that catches me up (with the exception of the birthday party blog, which I PROMISE is coming...maybe not this week but next).  Hope you all had an enjoyable weekend as well!

Sarah

My New Archnemesis

Is arch nemesis one word or two?  Anyway, meet my new archenemies:

What's that you ask?  A baby aero chamber and an inhaler.  Let me back up...

Lilly caught a little cold at the end of the week before last.  The little girl of the family that we nanny share with attends pre-school five half-days a week, and as a result, shares a lot germs.  I know sickness happens, especially during this time of year when there is a ton of crap going around anyway, so it's normally no big deal.  Additionally, Lilly still seems to be working on molars and as I have mentioned before, a lot of her teething symptoms are the same as cold symptoms (runny nose, low-grade fever), so it's sometimes hard to tell whether she is actually ill or just teething.  Anyway, last week Lilly developed a cough.  Again, no big deal, it wasn't too bad and she wasn't coughing consistently.  She never really ran a fever and seemed to feel fine so I didn't think much of it.  On Sunday, her cough worsened.  Where as it had been kind of dry and infrequent before, it was more frequent and sounded like it was breaking up.  I assumed this meant her body was trying to flush the cold out and thought it was a good thing.  She coughed a lot during her sleep on Sunday night and when she woke up yesterday morning she sounded pretty bad, so I called the doctor to see whether I should bring her in.

I spoke with the nurse, gave her Lilly's symptoms, etc. and asked her what she thought.  I have no problem taking L to the doctor, but I also hate spending the co-pay and the however long the wait is that day at the doctor for them to say, "it's just a cold, nothing you can do, give her Tylenol every four hours."  In other words, I wanted to make sure I wasn't being neurotic taking her in for no reason.  The nurse told me that a lot of times if babies are teething in addition to a cold (yes), they don't know that they are supposed to cough to clear out all of that fluid, so the drool + drainage from the cold leads to congestion.  She told me to keep an eye on L, and if she started running a high fever or if the cough lasted longer than 10 days to bring her in.  She told me also to pay attention to her appetite (it had decreased some) and to try to get  her to drink water (she did not drink as much as normal and therefore didn't have any super wet diapers yesterday, which is also rare).

Last night was terrible.  The poor child laid in bed for 3 hours wide awake after I put her down because she was coughing so hard she couldn't fall asleep.  Any of you who have been around her for bed time know that that's a rare occurrence - she normally talks to herself for a few minutes and then is out with no problem for the rest of the night.  Last night, I had to go in three times to try to console her.  Finally, on the third time, I took in some more medicine and her water and rocked her for a little while and that did the trick.  She didn't wake up during the night but she coughed all night long, and the cough started to sound worse and worse.  When she woke up this morning, not only was her cough worse, but she had started wheezing terribly when breathing.  

I called the doctor and was able to get Lilly an appointment for first thing this morning, and thank the Lord I did.  Dr. V was not happy with the wheezing at all, and they immediately started running all sorts of tests to monitor L's oxygen levels and check for pneumonia.  All of this, of course, made Mommy super nervous, since pneumonia in babies L's age can be fatal.  They determined that she did not have pneumonia or an ear infection (thank you Lord!).  Essentially, L's cold settled in her lungs and turned into a terrible respiratory infection.  The doctor was shocked with the amount of fluid/the sound of her wheeze that L didn't have an ear infection, too.  The result is that we now have to give Lilly breathing treatments until she's better using this handy contraption:

Did I mention that I hate the aforementioned contraption?  Lilly HATES the breathing treatments.  It took three of us at the doctor to administer the first one:  I pinned her limbs, Carney tried to distract her/helped pin limbs, and the nurse administered the treatment to show us how to do it.  We basically have to put the mask up to L's face, puff the inhaler once, wait for her to take 6 screams/cries breaths, wait one minute, and repeat four times, 5-6 times/day (decreasing as she gets better).  Dr. V told us that the medicine in the inhaler doesn't work on a lot of children as young as Lilly, but they always try it to see, so I am thankful it works for her even though it is hard to administer.  She cries big pitiful crocodile tears the whole time, and right about the time she starts to calm down (during the one-minute break in between puffs), we have to give her another dose.  It is not too hard with 2 people, but I am not looking forward to having to administer it by myself tomorrow night (Dan has a work dinner).  Did I mention that most pharmacies do not carrie aero masks small enough for babies without having to special order?  What a disaster my morning was.

My pitiful girl had a rough day:

But when we got home, Lilly had a birthday present from Aunt Sheila that she is super excited about:

Can't wait to rock this during football season!  Thanks, Auntie Sheils!

Then, her bestie sent her a picture text that made her whole night:

Cutest thing ever?  I think so.

The moral of this story is to trust your instincts.  I'm so glad I didn't wait it out a few more days thinking that the cough was just breaking up.  It's easy to second-guess yourself, at least in my experience.  Lilly honestly did not really even act like she was feeling badly - she just looked pitiful, if that makes sense.  I could tell the cough/wheezing were different this morning, so I took her in, and I'm so glad I did.

SO...here's to surviving the next few days of breathing treatments!  Wish me luck tomorrow night when I'm on my own.  Carney had to do it today and said it wasn't easy but she survived, so hopefully I will have the same experience.

Hope your Tuesday was less eventful than ours was!  :-)

Sarah

Mama Bear

The inner mama bear was out in full force yesterday.  Well every day, really, but yesterday I truly wanted to hurt someone.  Why, you ask?  Because we had a "first," but NOT the good kind.  Yesterday, I had to take my baby to the doctor for her first sick visit, at a mere 6 weeks old.

This fact in itself thoroughly annoys me, because we have worked SO hard to follow doctor's orders.  The pediatrician told us not to take her in public (germs!) for 2-3 months, and by gosh we have not left this house.  Which has been even worse for me, considering I really have not left this house since Week 30 of pregnancy (stupid bed rest).  You can ask anyone that's come to visit, I am a hand washing nazi - and don't you dare get near my child unless I've physically seen you wash your hands.  So the fact that she's sick makes me feel like a terrible parent.  Obviously I know I couldn't have done anything to prevent this aside from not let anyone in the house until she was 2 months old, and it would have happened sooner or later anyway, but 6 weeks is just so early to already be sick, and my little baby is so pitiful that it breaks my heart.

Lilly woke up yesterday morning congested.  Normally I would not think anything of this - I guess her room must be a little dry or something because most mornings she wakes up a little congested.  In fact, I even specifically asked the pediatrician about this at her one-month check up, whether I needed to have her humidifier on full time or not, and she said no, that it was normal.  Yesterday, however, L was much more congested than normal.  I still may not have thought anything of it except the poor baby had this gunk running from her eyes, and that definitely hasn't happened before.  I called and left a message for the nurse just asking what I should do, if I needed to bring her in, etc.  We had our first experience with the rectal thermometer, which went better than expected, and thankfully Lilly didn't have a fever.  The pediatrician asked that we go ahead and come in anyway since Lilly is so young - they didn't want to chance it (this is where I feel like the worst parent in the world again).

The visit itself was pretty harmless.  I will say that they weighed her - with her clothes on, after a feeding, and with a full diaper - and she weighed 11 pounds!  My little chunkster!  The doctor came in and examined her and said the poor thing has her first cold.  Unfortunately there's not much we can do for it other than let it run its course, so she told us to make sure to use the humidifier in Lilly's room until the cold is gone, and to use a saline spray in her nose and then suction out her little boogies every 3-4 hours until she's better.  Thankfully, I had some Little Noses that was sent to us recently by a good friend, and it seems to be helping, at least a little.

I have worried sick about the child all night, I think I have been in her room at least 5 times to make sure she's still breathing.  The doctor said that at this stage, babies can't yet breathe out of their mouths unless they're crying, so if she's crying that may be why.  Lilly has been a really trooper throughout all of it, she really has not cried at all.  She slept from 9:30p - 2:30a and probably would have slept a little longer but we went in and got her as soon as she started making noise so we could suction her nose since it had been a while.  She was SO happy - she let Dan suction her without making a sound, and didn't even cry at the diaper change.  In fact, she was smiley and perfect.  Why was Dan up with us, you ask?  Typically, I don't ask him to get up with me except on the weekends when he doesn't have to work (he feeds, I pump), but I made an exception this time because I, too, have this nasty cold.  The pediatrician says that's actually probably a good thing because I'm producing antibodies to fight it which Lilly is getting through my breast milk, but honestly last night I did not think I was going to make it.  I went to bed when she did, in case it was going to be a long night - I anticipated lots of waking up and tears from her not being able to breathe - and I had the chills and couldn't get rid of them, and my throat hurt so bad every time I swallowed that I wanted to cry.  Anyway so I was still feeling a little unsteady at the 2:30 feeding and Dan was nice enough to help me out, sweet man.

So, we're going to spend today trying to nurse my little one back to health.  I foresee lots of snuggling on the couch in our future.  If she is as happy all day as she was at her overnight feeding, I think we will do just fine.  Until then, whoever brought this sickness into my house and infected my baby better be thanking your lucky stars that I don't know who you are, because Mama Bear is NOT HAPPY that you got her precious angel baby bear sick.

I can't end the post without saying Happy 4th Birthday to my first-born, Layla.  You have brought us so much joy, and we love you so much, sweet girl!  I wonder if she's looking forward to her annual dog birthday cake and new toys?  :-)

Sarah