sick

No Hoax

| patmcg

The recent positive changes to Molly’s sleeping pattern are sticking (for now), after a temporary setback.

Molly got sick again a few days ago, and all the congestion and drainage was bugging her in her sleep. She had three tough nights, tossing and turning and waking up every hour or two. She was not sleeping much at school either during the day, and she was getting to be a bit of a mess.

Then, once her health improved, and we moved her out of her swaddle so she could position herself any way she wanted, she started sleeping like a maniac. On Wednesday night, she slept 12 hours, from 7 pm to 7 am! This is the famed “7 to 7” holy grail of baby sleeping that several other baby parents have told me just happened magically one day to their babies. (I don’t remember how or when this happened with Claire; I guess it wasn’t quite as momentous of an event). Molly is also falling asleep easier now without the swaddle. As long as the timing is right, I just turn on the white noise, cuddle with her while I sing Rock-a-bye Baby a few times, and put her in her crib. She usually throws herself on her side and falls asleep right away.

Proving it’s not a fluke, Molly has kept this 7 to 7 pattern up for the three nights since. The one gotcha is that she consistently wakes up one hour into her sleep, right during Claire’s own bedtime routine. Last night, Kit was out of commission, so I had to let Claire finish up her own teeth and hair brushing by herself and then watch a little extra TV while I went upstairs and soothed Molly back to sleep. There were no complaints from Claire on the extra TV!


“It” Spreads Again

| patmcg

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

| patmcg
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

| patmcg
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

| patmcg
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.

The Dreaded RSV

| patmcg
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!


Sleepin’ In

| patmcg

Here is an interesting first for Claire. This morning around 7:00 am, I was downstairs making breakfast and waiting for Claire to wake up. Claire came out and said, “Daddy, I’m still a little tired. Will you put me back to bed and put my covers on real flat?”

Of Claire’s four years, this is the first time I recall Claire wanting to go back to bed in the morning to sleep a little longer. She’s never been a big sleeper, but Claire has been tired lately. Perhaps because she is battling the same RSV / cold that the rest of us are, and it has wiped us all out. Still, it is nice to see that Claire has come to appreciate the benefits of sleeping in a little bit.

Claire has also been falling asleep very quickly at night. Sometimes at the five-minute check after tuck-in, Claire is already asleep. She is almost always asleep at 15 minutes. This is a big turnaround from the past, when she would sometimes take an hour or more to fall asleep.

Double Pumping

| patmcg
Kit is still pumping to feed Molly. I hope Kit will forgive me if this is too personal, but Kit has taken untold steps to feed Molly breast milk over the last couple of months, and I wanted to recognize her heroic effort.

Due to her long hours on the job and Molly’s physiology, Kit has not been able to simply nurse Molly. It sounds like such a simple idea to breast feed, but several weeks of serious frustration, worrying, and discomfort on Kit and Molly’s part showed how difficult it can really be. Molly was not gaining enough weight and simply had to have some formula, but Kit was still spurred on to feed Molly as much breast milk as possible.


It may be a surprise to the uninitiated, but this whole breastfeeding topic is so full of controversy that it makes Republicans and Democrats look tame. Kit is no “breastfeeding nazi” by any means. In fact, she is often put off by the guilt-tripping attitude of the breastfeeding crowd. But this fall’s seasonal flu and N1H1 outbreaks, which can be deadly to infants, inspired Kit to get Molly her breast milk. Kit was dismayed by the exaggerated claims of the breastfeeding crowd, so as a scientist herself, she did a literature search on the topic. She saw nothing compelling about breast milk helping with intelligence or obesity, but she did find a credible scientific article suggesting that breast milk might objectively might help fight off sickness to some extent. The amount of help is not fully understood, and of course nothing is guaranteed, but just that glimmer of hope was enough for Kit find another way to get Molly her breast milk.

What resulted was pumping — lots and lots of pumping. Kit has never really complained about it, but her pumping regimen has been a tough haul. Kit is often up at 5:00 am, sometimes earlier, to pump before work. And then she comes home at 6:30 and heads straight up to pump. Dinner time usually involves Claire and I eating dinner together while Kit is off performing the grotesque ritual of pumping, and Molly (the sleepyhead) is napping. Kit shows up some 30-45 minutes later with a few ounces of breast milk in two plastic bottles, and then we warm up her stale dinner while I got Claire ready for bed. The whole thing was pretty disruptive to our whole family routine, especially for Kit. Early on, when Kit was still on maternity leave, she was actually pumping about 10 times a day, and each session took around 30-45 minutes. And then there is the cleaning, the endless cleaning. There are eight pieces that need to be hand cleaned and steam sterilized in the microwave each time Kit pumps, each piece having odd corners, flaps, and hard to reach areas. Admittedly, this one affects me the most, so I had to get it in here.

Through all of this, Kit must feel like a cow, a very sore cow. And she is a cow (I mean a mom) who has gone to great lengths for her calf (I mean baby) just in case it helps. The good news is that something is working because Molly has not gotten a common cold yet, much less the flu, even after weeks of day care. The breast milk may have had something to do with that. I would also give credit to hand washing. Thankfully, Molly’s school is full of hand washing nazis.

Panda on the Loose

| patmcg

The new school year started today for Claire. She has graduated to the next class, and is now officially a Panda. This is good since Claire is now with her own age group. She had spent the first few weeks in the Colts classroom with slightly older kids since they had a random spot open just to get her through the summer.

Claire may benefit from having more girls in her new classroom as compared to the Colts, where there were only three girls to about a dozen boys. However, she will leave behind some friends, including her very favorite twins, Alex and Leo, who she seems to follow around and literally pull their arms towards her to make them play with her.

Claire’s new teacher writes a little summary of all the kids’ days, which is helpful. Apparently today Claire ate “some” of her lunch (just the muffin and bluberries), but she was too busy talking to do much eating. (One of her Colts teachers had also remarked that she “treats lunch time as sort of a social hour.”) Claire’s new teacher circled “cheerful”, “silly”, and “talkative” to describe Claire’s mood today. I am glad Claire had a good day, especially since she is a little sick. If I were to fill out the same form for tonight, I would have circled “cuddly” and “frustrated”.