Mad Rolling!

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Between stomach problems and various illnesses for the past few weeks, Molly has not been making great strides physically. She is still a very small baby and mostly lays around on her back. But for the first time since early-to-mid January, Molly has had a solid stretch of full health and good eating.

Last weekend, Kit and I both agreed it was time to get Molly exercising again to work up her strength and endurance. Namely, this means tummy time, or laying flat on her belly. This does not sound too tough, but it is a workout for Molly. She strains and cries as she arches her back and lifts her head to look around. After only a few minutes, she is crying and exhausted, and we have to pick her up to let her catch her breath. Last weekend, Kit started Molly on a really tummy time regimen of three times a day.

Well, Molly’s good health and this focus on tummy time seem to be paying off. Molly hit a major milestone at school today. During tummy time, she rolled from her front to her back, and then again from her back to her front. She even repeated this a few times! She also started to relax during the tummy phase, and looked around and giggled instead of straining and crying. Way to go, Molly! we are glad to see you “back” on track!
todo: picture


Riddle Me This

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Claire has started a new game in the car to and from school. She likes to play little guessing games based on letters. For example, today she said, “What’s a park near our house that starts with letter Z-Z-Z-Z Zee?” She says this sounding out the sound of the letter Z a few times, apparently something they do in school. I answer her quiz, “Zilker Park”, to which Claire says proudly, “That’s right! You got it!”  Another good one was, “I am thinking of something that starts with T-T-T-tee, and they have trunks, and there are lots of them all around.”  The answer: trees.

Sometimes the letters are a bit off. One time her hint was, “What’s an animal that starts with the letter L and has a trunk?” I was stumped on this one. Claire’s answer was an ELephant. I told her that elephant starts with an E, not an L, even though the first sound of the word sounds like the letter L, or “el”. Claire was slightly deflated by this but took note and moved on to some more additional questions for me.

You know, spelling really is confusing. I mean really, elephant starts with an E, not an L? That is just not right.


“It” Spreads Again

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Molly finally got the dreaded stomach virus that everyone else is getting.

She has a fever and has cut way back on eating. She is often very upset by the sight of the bottle and cries instead of eating, even after five or more hours without food. When she does eat, she vomits frequently, a couple of times a day. If you want to feed Molly lately, you better wear a rain coat!

Note from the future:


We eventually had to put Molly on Pedialite to keep her hydrated and out of the emergency room.  She started to get her strength back and managed a good solid recovery.  She missed a full week of school, including the temporary school closing, and got to know a few different temporary nannies.  After her full recovery, she started eating again really well, or “like a horse” as her teacher put it.

The Scourge Continues

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It is not just Molly and Claire who have been suffering from this and that malady over the past few weeks. Heck, even our dog Muffin has it or something like it. She is lethargic and has been vomiting at night! I still keep a plastic bag by my bed waiting for it to hit me. For now, I will happily settle for my constant low-level head cold.
But this is not just affecting our household. Their kids’ whole school is suffering. Almost half the teachers were out this past week, as well as over 30 kids, all due to an impressive variety of ailments. Lacking teachers and students, the school is running on emergency mode, and classes have to be combined. To “help break the cycle of contagion”, the school is closing for a four-day weekend from February 13 to 16. The healthy teachers and some cleaning crew are disinfecting everything in the school from top-to-bottom.

Here is a partial message from Claire’s teacher:
Just want to make sure that you all know that we will be closed on Monday, Feb 16th and now Tuesday, Feb 17th to better ensure that all of our children and staff can fully heal before coming back. There are quite a few different illnesses floating around up there. If you have means of keeping your children at home tomorrow, please do. BELIEVE ME–you do NOT want even the slightest bit of any of those illnesses, the worst of all being the flu. It’s absolutely horrible.

We all want to put the cold, wet, dark, dreary winter of 2009-2010 behind us!


Stomach Virus Redux

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The terrible stomach virus is back!

A day after an apparent full recovery, Claire work up once again vomiting. Around 9:30 at night, we heard Claire suddenly crying from her bedroom. When we ran in, she and her bed were covered with vomit. Kit and I went into wordless motion to get everything cleaned and get Claire some new clean sheets. We had the sheets clothes in the laundry and new spare sheets on the bed in no time. Kit slept in Claire’s for a while to help her relax.

This may have simply been Claire’s stomach having trouble adjusting to eating again. Until today, she had mostly been eating very little, and only bland things like plain tortillas. Today I sent her a mostly regular school lunch, including some lil’ smokies, thinking (perhaps wrongly) that her stomach would tell her whether she should eat it. Maybe it did not agree with her after all!


The Dreaded Stomach Virus

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Just as Molly has more or less kicked off the remnants of her terrible RSV attack, and she is just getting back to eating and sleeping normally… Kit and Claire have now come down with an apparent case of a dreaded stomach virus, which may or may not be rotavirus. In my limited experience with these things, RSV and the stomach virus seem to be among the worst of the “peacetime” viruses. By “peacetime”, I mean something that does not automatically land you in the
hospital.
Here are the lowlights of this one:
  • Kit woke up early Monday morning vomiting profusely. She was sick enough to call in sick to work for the first time in memory. When she told her colleagues she was vomiting and had diarrhea, they quickly told her to stay home. They said something like, “Keep that thing at home.”
  • Then on Monday night at bedtime Claire was complaining that she was scared she was going to have nightmares. At 4 am I heard her moan in the stairway leading up to our bedroom, then as I got to the stairs, she vomited all over the stairs and started screaming and crying. This is the first time Claire has vomited since she was a baby, when then it was only ever once or twice. Kit stayed with Claire from 4 am to 6 am while I kept on Molly duty, who was finally just fully recovering from RSV.
  • Kit crawled into work on Tuesday. She took a shower and thought she looked pretty together. At work they told her, in a nice way, that she looked terrible.
  • Claire stayed home on Tuesday, the first time in memory that she stayed home from school. I had to drag poor Claire with me in the cold and damp weather to drop off Molly at school. Molly — miraculously, and for the first time in weeks — was consistently just smiling and happy. At school, Claire waited in the shoe-changing room just outside of the Molly’s classroom while I dropped off Molly, to avoid bringing those germs into the room.
  • Once back home, Claire spent almost the entire day curled up on an inflatable bed in front of the TV in the living room watching The Aristocats over and over. The idea was just to make her as comfortable as possible. She moaned with tummy aches throughout the morning. The aches subsided for the most part by afternoon, when she fell into a disturbed sleep in the living room.
  • Already behind at work and exhausted, I calculated that if either I or Molly got this nasty thing, then it would be real trouble. If Molly got it, I would sure miss another few days of work. If I got it, then I would sure miss work too and surely give it to Molly.
  • Although all the teachers already had suffered from the stomach virus in the past few days, and now Kit and Claire had it, this is when I started my freakish obsession with keeping Kit and Claire’s germs off of Molly. It was a challenge, and my hands ended up dry and cracked and literally bleeding from the constant hand washing. I was also doing endless loads of laundry. If Kit or Claire so much as touched something that Molly might later touch, it went in the laundry. I also disinfected the hard surfaces daily. I was so excited when I found the Clorox. I wanted to kill that nasty virus. I was out for blood, and now I had the good hard stuff. Kit said she had never seen anyone so excited to find bleach.
  • In the afternoon, I had to drag poor Claire through the cold and damp to pick up Molly, who was still miraculously smiling and just fine.
  • Claire fell asleep on the inflatable bed as I fed Molly and put her to sleep upstairs around 6:30 that night. We just transferred her to her bed and let her sleep the rest of the night in there with Kit on the floor beside her.
  • Miraculously, the next morning, Molly and I both woke up smiling and fine. I was keeping a plastic bag by my bed at all times though, since this thing had caught both Kit and Claire with vomiting a fit in the middle of the night.
  • On Wednesday, Claire’s tummy was mostly better. She managed to eat two tortillas in the morning. I stated home with her though because she seemed real worn out and was not eating much.
  • I had a babysitter, Kailey, up to the house in the afternoon so I could get focus a on work for a little while.
  • Kailey handled Claire’s nap. Claire sobbed when it was time to go to sleep, then refused to pick a nap-time story, then the babysitter left Claire in her room sitting up. She peeked in a few minutes later, and Claire had fallen asleep in the a very awkward, sprawled out position with no covers on. Three hours later, after the Kailey had left, I woke up poor Claire to drag her to school to pick up Molly again. Claire would have to wait in the shoe-changing room once again.
  • That night, I told Claire that we would probably send her to school tomorrow, and she went into a rare diatribe about how she hated school and she was really really sick and needed to stay home for five days. She said she really hates taking naps at school because she hates hate hates sleeping because it makes her tired. When pressed, Claire said she liked her friends at school and her teachers too, but she hated school. She wanted to have her friends over to the house instead. I guess it turns out that Claire loved lazing around watching TV all day. She was also very upset that we were putting away the inflate-a-bed in the living room.
  • Claire was still worn out but good enough for school the next day. She protested mightily at first, but once was got there, she seemed happy to be back.

Career Plans

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Claire has been thinking about being a working mom lately.

Her daily note from school today said Claire “went to work” while Carissa (her teacher) “babysat” her babies named “Dona” and “Roshashana”.

One night during her bath, Claire rattled off a few job ideas, but after some thought settled on being a teacher.

Yesterday, said Claire said she wanted to be a doctor and go to the hospital with her mom every day. Kit was really touched by this. However, she is suggesting that Claire look into an allied health field or a technician position rather than being a straight up doctor. The hours and stress have been getting to her lately. :-


The Dreaded RSV

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I had never heard of RSV before, but now I sure have.
It stands for Respiratory Syncytial Virus. In kids and adults, it is basically just a cold. In a baby of Molly’s age, it is a nasty viral infection that takes 7 to 10 days to clear up. I could go on for some time about this nasty thing, but let me just hit the highlights:

  • Molly came home from school on Friday 1/15 irritable and with a bad cough. The teachers said she “wanted to be held most of the day”, by which I think they meant she was fussy. Either way, this was not the usual Molly.
  • That Friday night, Molly’s cough continued, and she had a lot of trouble sleeping. We had to hold her, taking shifts sitting in the glider most of the night.
  • On Saturday, Molly was in worse shape than ever. She was miserable, and Kit and/or I had to hold her all day to keep her even slightly comfortable. We literally could not put her down without her crying, and she cried in our arms a lot too. We verified that Molly had a low fever. Poor Molly.
  • Saturday night was the worst yet. Molly was uncomfortable, coughing and wheezing all night. There was no peace for Molly or any of the rest of us, except for Claire and Muffin, who were sleeping downstairs across the house.
  • Kit’s mom and dad, and Kit’s uncle Bob came up for a “quick visit” on Sunday afternoon. Kit’s mom ended up staying to help for a few days (and nights). Since it was only supposed to be a day trip, she had not packed anything for the stay. So went to Walgreens only to get a toothbrush. Kit’s mom mostly handled Molly during the weekdays while Kit worked and I got some work done.
  • We ended up making two separate trips to the pediatrician. On the first, they said it might clear in about four days, which seemed like a long time for a cold. On the second visit, they verified it was RSV with a blood test. They said it would be a 7 to 10 day ordeal, and then it would only gradually peter out. They put her on a saline breathing treatment to help a little with the congestion, but there was no medicine they could give to help Molly.
  • Molly’s fever subsided, and she became well enough during the day to take her back to school. The good teachers at school were willing to do Molly’s nebulizer treatment a couple of times a day.
  • Molly’s smile returned, between coughing attacks, after the first couple of rough days.
  • The nights continued to be pretty tough. Molly’s hard-earned ability to put herself to sleep so consistently and her routing of sleeping through the night with one middle-of-the-night feeding were out the window. Hopefully they will be back soon!
  • I am writing this on Jan 25, ten days after this thing started, and Molly is mostly better, but she is still exhausted and sometimes extra fussy. She had 5 or 6 hours of naps today and was still over-tired and cranky when we tried to put her to sleep at 7 tonight. She sometimes still coughs and wakes herself up, but now she does sometimes manage to put herself back to sleep. So this is progress!
So there it is, Molly’s first real nasty illness. We are really glad to gradually be putting this behind us!


Molly’s First TV Show

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Today was the first time I put on a TV show specifically for Molly’s entertainment. Sure, she has seen a little bit of TV just from hanging out in the living room, but this was the first show just for her.

I was looking for a way to help Molly relax while I did her nebulizer sodium chloride treatment for her lingering RSV infection.  Kit and her mom had been using the mobile for this purpose, but it was sort of unwieldy to set up up by myself.  So why not pull out a classic?  I put on the DVD of Claire’s old favorite: Baby Einstein: Baby Shakespeare.  As with Claire, Molly was engrossed by the puppets, music, and moving toys, and she did not mind the nebulizer one bit.

Now these Baby Einstein videos might not may your baby a genius, but you would have to be a real dummy not to use them from time to time!