Owie

Poor little pookie. She's having high fevers and coughing a lot in the last several days. She had a rough day. Monday morning we called to get an appt at her clinic and the soonest they had was 2:15 today, Tuesday. Then her temp spiked at 104.4 yesterday afternoon and when I called the triage nurse, all she could tell me was to give her ibuprofen and dress her in cooler clothes and keep the appt. Here she is cooling off in a t-shirt and eating a popsicle in Dad's lap:

So we go in today and they had to do some very unpleasant things. 1. Catheter to collect urine. Owie! 2. Blood draw. Owie! And then we had stay another half hour to see some results, and Lily was ready to go home by then. She actually went to the exam room door and pulled on John's coat. I gave it to her, and she dragged it over to him, handed it to him, and then went back to the door and reached up and turned the handle. Let's go!

Well, turns out it's not an infection, her lungs are clear so it's not pneumonia, her urine is fine, her white cells are fine, so it's a virus. Which is good and bad. Means we can't do anything else than we've been doing, pushing fluids, giving her ibuprofin for the fevers, and keeping her comfortable. No quick fix. And they couldn't say how long this would last, since it's mystery virus. Agh!

Because of the timing of her appt. today, she missed her nap and so fell asleep in the car on the way home. We tag teamed with her during the nap at home, and she woke up after a couple hours with another high fever and kind of delerious, saying "Owie" and crying. Poor babe. So we did more ibuprofen and then sang to her for a while, and then tried some honey (this is the newest thing, the doc said: works better than cough syrup. 1 tsp of honey and it helps with the coughing at night). After a while she became more coherent and responded to Cocoa jumping upon the bed. She actually crawled over and put her head on Cocoa's belly at one point, and Cocoa didn't even flinch, so we are giving Cocoa lots of praise for helping. She's eating some applesauce now with Dad, and I'm about to go check on them. She'll be sleeping in our bed for probably the next few nights at least. I just don't want her out of my sight with the way her fever spikes. Think healing thoughts for us.

New Word

First of all, this picture actually precedes the one from yesterday's post. I just don't have any new pictures because everyone is sicker today and the last thing on my mind is taking pictures. So here you see Lily has taken over the sink and is communing with the baby in the mirror.

She has a new word: Owie. She's been saying it the last few days about a little scratch she has on one hand, and when we ask her where the owie is, she'll hold up her hand to show us, and we kiss the owie. Well, today was a four-poop diaper day, which kinda stressed out her little bottom, and on the fourth go round, she did not want me wiping it off. I thought she was just being stubborn, and I was getting frustrated. I said "Lily, stop it!" And then I felt horrible because she started to cry a little and said "Owie!" over and over. She didn't want me touching her butt because she's getting diaper rash and it hurt! Poor baby. We finally got the job done with help from Dad, but she was very clear in letting us know that it was an owie. Good communication skills. I just hope her butt is better tomorrow. Or someone is better. We were all worse today, hacking and wheezing.

Warning: Extremely Adorable Naked Baby Ahead!

She didn't exactly get a bath, but started playing in the sink and then her shirt got wet so we had to take that off, and then, you know, it just progressed from there until we just went ahead and took the diaper off and got the J&J baby soap out. Sort of a sponge bath in the sink.

More Peas, Please

So when you have a cold and your nose is all stuffed up, it's really hard to eat. Because you have to close your mouth and then you can't breathe. So it's been frustrating for Lily to eat. So we've tried some new foods just for fun, and we found that she absolutely loves frozen peas! Well, I mean, we don't leave them frozen, we cook them, but in contrast to the icky mush that comes in baby food jars, frozen peas rock! Here she is snarfing some down and having fun doing it.

The other pic is her in her pajamas wandering around in my craft room lookin' for trouble. We're just starting to get her back on schedule for bedtime at 8pm, but it's not going too well. She is very cranky and doesn't want to go to sleep and so will cry and fuss and fight to get down out of your lap--Yes, we still let her fall asleep on us before we put her in the crib. We've never tried just putting her in the crib awake and saying "okay, it's bedtime, go to sleep." Well, maybe we have a couple times, but it didn't work. And we like holding her, so we feed her a bottle last thing and then sing to her and she goes to sleep, then we take her up to the crib. But she's been super fussy about going to bed while she's sick. Last night it took 2 1/2 hours to get her down, and John and I took shifts. I usually sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to her as a nap song and as a bedtime song, and so last night I made up some new words to sing to the same melody. She seemed to like them, as she finally laid her head down on my chest and went to sleep. Here's my lyrics:

Rest your head, close your eyes

and you will find a big surprise

Dreams are waiting just for you,

dreams of love--adventure, too.

Let this day be done and keep,

Darling girl now go to sleep.

She seems to be doing pretty well today. She was coughing an awful lot yesterday but not so much this morning. John says he is doing better but he can hardly talk. And I have a REALLY sore throat and am getting a sinus infection. Oh joy. That means nasal wash. God I hate doing that. It's so...I don't know, brutal. But anything is better than antibiotics. I think I need to go lie down. It's going to be a tired day for me.

Sick, sick, sick

Boy, I'll be glad when winter is OVER this year. It snowed last night for the first time in weeks and I'm like "feh." Not fun anymore. Everyone is sick in our house. Lily has been sick the longest, poor babe, from one virus to a cold to an ear infection. She's a little trooper, but she gets worn out and cranky and then doesn't want to go to sleep. The top is just when she was starting to get sick, with croup at night. Then a few days later she had a high fever and was very droopy. She needed lots of her dolls around her.

I Did It Again: I Am The Village Your Child Lives In

First of all, cutie pie is wearing some new duds. The sweater is part of a pkg of clothes we received in thanks for some of Lily's newborn and 3 month clothing that she doesn't fit into anymore. This woman picked out such cute stuff! And most of it fits now or will soon.

Now, about that village thing. We went to a bookstore reading this morning at Wild Rumpus, and although the storytime was a wash because it was so packed full of people, Lily had a great time because this store is like a little zoo. They have a few cats, 2 chinchillas, 3 ferrets, some parroty-looking birds that were very chatty, a couple doves, a gecko, a tarantula, and a little chickeny thing. I think it's a guinea hen. I'm not sure. But I'll call him Chic. So Chic roams free in the bookstore, and when storytime was over, the kids started all leaving and/or roaming around, and this one little boy was running through the store, trying to catch Chic, and pushing people and smaller children out of his way. Well, I got sick of it. When he ran in front of Lily while she was trying to approach Chic, I grabbed him and said "Hey, don't run in here." Then his Dad sort of showed up. Actually he was already standing near him, but he wasn't controlling the kid at all, and when I tried to correct his child, he mumbled something about "Hey, let's not....get...excited," and made eye contact with me but quickly looked away. I couldn't tell for sure if he was talking to me, and then when he had walked away from me, I heard him mumble even quieter something about "touch my kid." Well, dumbass, if you're not going to control your child and keep him from knocking over smaller kids because he's running in a crowded store, the village will intervene. I am the village.

Unfortunately the little brat was there for a while longer and I could see even more of this lame dad's parenting. His kid is running around and he says "Hey, buddy, slow...down...there." Oh yeah, that's real effective. See how he's not paying any attention to you?

I'm sorry, but I am not going to stand for this behavior when it gets close to my child. Am I stepping over the line? Tell me what you think.

Once the speed demon was gone, Lily was able to check out Chic at close range because she walked up to him very slowly and calmly. I think she might have touched him lightly before he sauntered off. It was funny, too, her and a couple other well-behaved calm little girls sort of chicken-hopped after Chic, following him but doing it in a chicken-like manner. Very cute.

Lily also pet one of the cats. The first attempt was not so good, because she went for the ear. The cat was so mellow, though, it just let itself get dragged a little ways by the ear before I peeled Lily's hand away and showed her how to pet gentle like she pets Cocoa. She did a good job after that. This was her first cat-petting! I give her a B+. Or maybe an A, since she didn't pull his ears after I told her not to. So maybe now that she's actually pet a cat, she'll start saying "cat" or at least not lumping them in with the dogs when she's looking in her books. Because usually she just calls them dogs or nothing at all. Now she has a real life experience with a cat. I wish we had gotten to pet the chinchillas, they are sooooooo soft. We'll have to go back there when it's not storytime, and see if we can pet the chinchies.

Baby It's Cold Outside!

I took this picture while driving to our Friday morning Movin' & Groovin' class. Daddy calls it dance class. It's nice that it's really close to us, like only 5 minutes away, but on the other hand, that's not enough time for the car to warm up, so we're cold!! Miss Lily doesn't like to wear her mittens so I try to pile her dollies on top of her hands to keep them warm. I'm probably worrying about it too much. I should make her a little muff to put her hands in. Like I know how to make one. Maybe I should look for one on Etsy, more like.

This morning Lily did the sign for "more" with her hands while she was sitting in her high chair eating and I was sitting at the dining room table eating breakfast. I was so excited!! We've been trying to get her to do that sign for months and she finally gets it!! So I was like "Oh! You want more! That's wonderful! Good job, Lily!" Of course then I had to figure out what she wanted more of. But that wasn't too hard. It was Cheerios. Although she doesn't nod her head "yes" yet, she will shake her head "no," so she's getting more and more tools to communicate with us. As opposed to just yelling. Which she sometimes does at night when we're trying to eat dinner and watch a TV show. But it was so cute to see her little hands do the "more" sign. Yeah, Lily!