Coming Back

One or more of us has been sick for nearly two weeks, now. First Elena, then James, then me and Joseph, and finally Jonathan. It's been a miserable world of fevers and/or coughs. I think we're just coming out of it.

I did get my January socks done. (my photographer, as always, was Elena.)
We've also been cleaning like mad so the bug guy can come. The apartment is now a weird mix of piles of bagged belongings and ultra-sterile surfaces. The bookshelf next to my pillow is nearly empty. As soon as I get the last of it boxed I'm going to toss the shelf. It's beat up and broken down and we were going to replace it when we have to move in 4 months, anyway, so off it goes. We also tossed the kids' play kitchen. I was sad to see it go, but not enough to risk bugs hiding in it. There's still more to be done, of course, but I'm surprised at how much we got done when barely functional.

So much to do, and I finally feel well enough to do it. Up, up and away, I guess.

Rest and Rescheduling

Elena and James have had fevers, the last couple days. His has been constant but low, while hers swings up and down with little warning. She's on her second day of missed school, and probably should have missed yesterday, too, but the deceptive temperature (and mood) swings made me think she was better. Sigh...

On the upside, I'm making major progress on my January Sock. I started Sunday morning, a week and a half ago, and after spending a day or two with one or more children draped across me in varying states of consiousness...

(Yes, we're both asleep in this one. He conked out halfway up.)

I went from here, on Saturday...



to here.

Most of that was worked just yesterday. If you're wondering why the first one still isn't done, it's because that ball of yarn ran out. Once I get the second one to the same point I'll bust out the third ball and finish them at the same time.

Green

I had been hoping to post pictures of field day but Elena spent the better part of last week at home with a series of fevers and general yuckiness. In fact, she managed to miss all (and only, poor girl) the days that there was something cool going on at school. On Tuesday she missed awards and her fever didn't go down until late that night so she had to miss field day on Wednesday, too. She went back to school Thursday but woke up crying with a 102 degree fever and the dry heaves at 4am on Friday and had to miss the bounce houses. Sigh...

Anyway, we do still have interesting stuff to share. We found a caterpillar in the back yard and Elena decided she wanted to watch it turn into a butterfly. I decided this would be OK and would nicely follow up their recent science unit about butterfly life cycles. So this is her caterpillar. She named it Green.


I dug out my old fish tank and Jonathan found it some sticks and leaves to hang out on, and we've had a really fun time watching it eat. It tried privet and elm and tomato but seemed to prefer basil. It's probably going to be an ugly brown moth but we're OK with that. All the excitement has been very tiring, though, and she's taken a ton of naps, this week. She even fell asleep while draped over the exercise ball.

Green is currently curled up in a tomato leaf, wrapped in a silky little cocoon. I need to remember to take more pictures.

Life Goes On

My Little Mommy continues to help with as many things as she can. She's the one that reminds me to make James cereal. Then she asks if she can help feed him. James, for his part, likes to flick his tongue in and out after each bite (and man does he have a pointy little tongue!). It gets a bit messy, but not as much as Joseph did with sucking his fingers between each bite.


In other news, when we headed out to playgroup on Wednesday Elena told me her ear hurt then promptly tripped on nothing twice in just under a minute. I called the doctor, got an appointment for the next morning, and Joseph developed a fever. He also laid down on the floor and fell asleep, as soon as we got home from the church, and then refused to eat his lunch, his snack, and the next day's breakfast . When Elena and I headed out the door to the doctor, he cried that he wanted to go with me. What could it hurt? It was the doctor, after all. She took a look at both of them. Elena has an outer ear infection(?) and Joseph has something that is not the flu. His fever got as high as 103.6 but has leveled out at the ~100 degree mark. Elena got drops for her ear, but Joseph mostly just gets to sit in my recliner with a straw sippy cup and a near-total absence of clothing. Poor kid.

'Christmas On the Closed Ward'

James' temperature was at 100.2 yesterday evening and topped out at 100.9 at 2am, but after a blessing from Daddy it was back down to a "normal" low-grade fever in the next hour. He was fussy and coughing worse than ever this morning, though, and it being Christmas morning the only thing open was the emergency room at the hospital across the street. Elena wanted to come with me and I let her, with the strict instructions that she obey my every request. She actually did a very good job sitting still and the nurses gave her a picture to color and some crayons. She also let me know when James threw up all over himself and the car seat, just as we were pulling into the hospital parking lot, and fetched me anything I needed from the diaper bag. I'm really glad she was there with me just so that I couldn't be obsessing over James' squeaky cries and raspy coughs. James was having trouble keeping his oxygen levels up, so we got a hose of humidified oxygen blowing on his face and a transfer to Dell Children's Hospital. Jonathan and one of the guys from the ward came just before the transfer to give James a blessing and take Elena home.

The children's hospital is really nice. I'm amused that the mirrors in the bathroom are tilted so the patients can still see themselves. We also have Tarzan stickers on the window of our door and pictures of ladybugs and butterflies on our wall. I honestly can't tell you what any of his nurses look like, though, because they're all wearing respiratory masks. Elena, Joseph and Jonathan brought a paper Christmas tree for our wall and presents for us to open so that we could have at least some Christmas stuff today. Jonathan brought his computer, too, so I can entertain myself. Now, we wait. They're going to start checking his lungs and trying him out with out the oxygen line tonight. He needs at least four hours of keeping his numbers up before we can go home.

Not-So-Silent Night

Jonathan and Elena are just fine. My cold is almost gone, and Joseph's is starting to clear. James has RSV. I got worried when James started throwing up, yesterday. We took him to the doctor and she asked for a follow-up, today. He was coughing worse, today, and quieter than usual. He took his morning naps by himself instead of insisting on being held. I'm not sure if I should be worried about that or not. Anyway, he got a thorough looking-over at the follow-up and that's when we got the unhappy news. No fever, but he squeaks a bit when he cries. I took him to get x-rays to make sure it hasn't progressed to pneumonia. We'll hear back about the results sometime this evening. The doctor said we were not allowed to be anywhere near the kids' cousin, Grant, though, because Grant is the same age as James and would be just as vulnerable. There went our plans for the evening. Ah, well. We're going to settle in with Rudolph, Frosty and Scrooge, instead, while baking gingersnaps and "stickernoodles." We have to make sure Santa has cookies. That is very, very important.

*Cough, Cough!*

The whole family has nasty coughs, some worse than others. James is favoring me with the saddest, most pathetic little tiny-cry ever, today. I guess it hurts too much for the real thing, poor baby. When I was up with the choir, I had to mouth the words to half of two different songs so I didn't turn purple or ruin the song with coughing. I don't know how Jonathan survived his narrator duties. I knew I couldn't take Joseph to nursery like that, though, so when we finished Sacrament Meeting I started bundling up both him and James, who had lost his clothes to a dirty diaper by this time. Elena, however, had sprinted off to Primary the instant the prayer was over and I didn't have the heart to break her the bad news. So, the little boys and I are at home and we'll need to go get Daddy and Elena in just a minute.

Question: What do you do for a 3 1/2 month-old with a cough and a sore throat?

It Gets Harder?!

We've been busy-but-not-busy for the last little bit, here. Joseph got sick, last week, and the effects lingered much longer than expected, especially for the amount of energy he was still displaying. It's possible that James caught it from him because he's suddenly super spitty. To top it off, James is going through a growth spurt and wants to do little beyond eat, sleep and scream. Joseph also has some kind of viral thing that's giving him sores at the corners of his mouth. We went to the doctor, today, and he came up neg. for strep, but she gave him a prescription to help him feel better while we wait for whatever it is to blow over. Plus, Elena is earning back her Big Girl Panties. She went from forgetting to go, to "forgetting" to go, to not caring, last month, and had to spend a few days in diapers and a week in training pants. She started back with the plain BGPs, today, and has to keep them dry to earn movies, helping with dinner, taking links off our advent paper chain, and her daily peice of Halloween candy. As if this was not enough insanity, I'm working on gifts for family, there's been an outbreak of sobbing at every tiny thing, and I have a talk to give in church on Sunday. Sigh...

I'll put up a ton of pictures soon.

Anyone Have a Carpet Cleaning Machine?

We had just finished Family Home Evening and I was on my way into the kitchen to cook some of the cookie dough from the fridge when Joseph threw up all over the living room floor. 1) Thank goodness we had cleaned up all the toys and relocated the spare futon mattress while we were cleaning, this afternoon. 2) I guess I'm not doing yoga or pilates anytime soon. I scrubbed it as well as I could but there's still no way I'm holding my face anywhere near that until I can get some serious deep cleansing done.

Out And About

Normally, I wouldn't really want to take a baby out quite this early, but Daddy's cold makes a big difference. James and I went to the doctor, this morning, to follow up with all the monitoring from the hospital. The jaundice was mild to begin with and it seems to be clearing up on schedule, or something like that. They didn't stick him to check sugars, but did ask about how often he eats (Cluster-feed--once an hour--all morning long, then every 4 hours the rest of the time) and she thought that was good enough. He's already grown a quarter inch and weighed in at 7 lbs 4.5 ozs. I think that puts him in the 25th and 50th percentiles, respectively. We'll have to see how long that lasts. After getting some breakfast for everyone and getting Elena and Joseph dressed, we went to playgroup. The weather is beautiful, and the wonderful cool breezes reminded me that Elena only has one pair of pants in her current size. James snoozed away in the sling the entire two hours we were at the park, and at HEB, afterward, when we stopped in to get cold medicine for Jonathan. It was a really nice outing, but I think we're done for the day. Maybe tomorrow night...

Bad Numbers

Joseph's sick. I guess. He's not sick in the usual ways, he just has a nasty fever. When he got up from his nap (~2 or 3pm) he was at 100.2 and, after some nice cold milk and a refusal to eat chicken and noodles, fell asleep on Daddy's shoulder. I checked him again when he got up the second time and he was at 101.6, so I went for the Tylenol and cold watered down juice. He's a little sluggish, but still up to his usual tricks. I'm hoping it's just teeth, and not something worse.

Update: He's fine, today, back down in the normal range.

Harry!!!

Our Stake Pioneer Day party was Friday night, and was very good, but we left early to get to Barnes & Noble for Harry Potter. Yes, I dressed up (Ravenclaw school robes). Yes we took pictures of us buying the book. Yes, we read the first chapter in the car on the way home (Oh. My. Good. Ness!). Yes I stayed up 'til 7am reading. It's seriously intense, folks, but I had to stop reading. *very minor spoiler warning* Harry finds a picture that Lily had sent to Sirius of baby Harry riding his first broomstick. Since I had been watching my own videos of Joseph pushing his truck around just the day before, the two become utterly inseperable. Harry was Joseph, and Joseph was Harry. All those horrible things had happened to my baby. I needed Harry to survive because he was MY baby. The emotional investment had increased a hundredfold and it was making me, literally, sick. I must have already had something viral, or eaten something questionable, though, because I actually threw up. I can count the number of times I've been that sick in the last 12 years on one hand, and three of them are pregnancy related. (No, I am not pregnant, for all those who have asked.) I haven't dared touch the book since. I'll finish it, sometime, but I need recovery time and some emotional distance first. And Jeri, I really wanted to come! Missing Tanner's big day was really hard.