The Fish Pond

Life Has a Funny Way of Making You Remember

I spent most of last night listening to Sunny hack and cough and bark. She's had a mildish cough since the beginning of the week and it has been getting progressively worse, but I wasn't too worked up about it - I've got four kids. I can do croup. Last night was particularly bad, though, and she would get into coughing fits where she couldn't really catch her breath well between coughs. We steamed her up in the bathroom, but she started hacking again the minute we left the bathroom, so off we went to the pediatrician this morning.

"She's not just coughing, she's wheezing. Has she had a problem with wheezing or needed breathing treatments before?"

I started to say no, then nearly smacked myself. The pneumonia following the swine flu. Duh. Can you believe I had forgotten? We've been so healthy since then I plumb forgot just how bad it was.

Very, very, very bad.

Anyway, Sunny earned herself her very own inhaler and spacer, complete with teddy bear pictures on the sides.

Totally gratuitous picture of Sunny using my awesome binoculars to find...a squirrel. On our deck.

And hopefully the presence of such items will make it so I can get some sleep tonight. I have something very important to do early tomorrow morning (and I'm rather nervous about it - not the race itself, but the getting up and getting my butt downtown at the crack of dawn all by myself part).

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Trout will be attending patrol camp in a couple of weeks, and the parent information meeting was this week. Patrol Camp is put on by the county police, so I figured if she's going to go to a sleep-away camp, going with the cops can only be a good thing. At the meeting they introduced the key people who run the camp, among them a 36-year veteran crossing guard. Who happened to live in the house in front of which was my bus stop when I was a patrol 30 years ago. Her daughter was my sister's best friend for a number of years in elementary school. I approached her after the meeting and asked if she recognized me, and she said the face was familiar but she wasn't sure. I told her my name and she freaked out. She's going to keep an extra eye on Trout during the camp week, and I feel a mite less anxious about the whole thing knowing just how capable are the hands she'll be in. I had forgotten the role that wonderful woman played in my own patrol career, but again, life has a funny way of reminding us about things that are important, even when we get so busy with life that we forget.

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Yesterday I was out of bread and granola and I've started making my own, so I figured if I was going to heat up the house baking on a ninety degree day, I might as well go for broke.

We joined a CSA a few weeks back, and so have found ourselves with more potatoes, lettuce, and strawberries than we know what to do with. We've eaten a lot, given some away, and I froze some of the berries for smoothies later, but I still had a ton of them left. So I taught myself how to make jam. No idea how it tastes yet, but since the only ingredients are sugar and strawberries, it can't be too bad. It's a rather hot business, my kids asked how I got my hair to go "all curly like that," but I only burned myself once though I probably moved far too slowly step to step. I'm sure I can go twice as fast next time. I'm looking forward to canning surplus tomatoes and beans later on this summer.

Any ideas on what to do with all this lettuce? I don't know how many more salads I can take without turning green.

Seriously. Wonderful, but lots of lettuce. This was only our first week's share, and we got more and more lettuce the next three weeks. Lettuced out.

That Uncultured Swine

Would you believe we still don't have all the sickness out of the house? Sunny is still sick, suffering from what the doctor believes is a secondary viral infection. She's still running a fever at night and she's still coughing. We get one more day for the fever to resolve itself before they start running bloodwork and other unpleasantries.

Okay, all that was true yesterday two days ago when I started this post, and you see how much I managed to get written before I got sucked away again. Her fever stayed down last night, so today yesterday, two and a half weeks after we started this whole mess, Sunny went back to school to join her sister and brother, Nemo went to the babysitter, and I cleaned up the disgusting disaster area otherwise known as my family room. The mess was so bad that I simply took a big rubbermaid tub, threw everything in it that wasn't laundry, trash, or a book, and told the big three that they have until tomorrow tonight to clean everything they wanted out of it, and whatever is left is going to charity or in the trash. It was foul. It feels so good to have that room, the main room in our house and where we all spend the most time, clean and clear.

I want to thank everyone for their well wishes, prayers, kind words and thoughts. Before the antibiotics took effect, Trout just laid on the couch and stared into the back of it, not having the energy to face forward and stare at the tv instead, and she loves her some tv. I had to sit next to her with a cup with a straw to get her to drink anything. She was so weak and grisly pale, like Ruth in Fried Green Tomatoes just before she died. The last time she scared me that bad she was nearly washed out to sea. My nerves could really do without all that, but I guess that's just one of those things about being a mom. If my kids didn't scare the crap out of me all the time something would be wrong. At any rate, after two doses of the antibiotic she woke up the next day yelling at Sunny, so I knew then she'd be okay. Augmentin rocks.

If you have the unfortunate luck to have any member of your family get H1N1, please, please make sure you monitor them for several days after you think they are all better. Our experience with Sunny has taught us this. She got sick first, coughing and running a moderate fever but not the scary 104 that Nemo hit or even the 103 that Little Man had. The fever lasted five days and broke on a Friday. It stayed down all weekend, so I sent her to school on Monday. By Wednesday she was running a fever again, and due to the experience with Trout I suspected pneumonia and took her in to the doctor on Thursday morning. The doctor confirmed it was either bronchitis or early pneumonia, commended me for bringing her in so quickly, and put her on antibiotics. Once again the fever broke on Friday so we sent her to school Monday. Monday night she started to run a fever AGAIN. So thinking that the antibiotics weren't appropriate and we needed a different one I took her back to the doctor and said WTF why can't we get rid of this stinking thing? The doctor said her lungs were clear and that she thought Sunny had a secondary virus, that her body/immune system were so weak from fighting off the H1N1 and the bronchitis/pneumonia that it has made her susceptible to everything else out there. It cleared in a couple of days, but if it hadn't they would have started running bloodwork etc. looking for something much worse.

Please, if you get this, err on the side of caution and keep your child home an extra day, if you can, to give their little bodies time to strengthen so they won't succumb to something else. They need that time. Sunny may be back at school now, but she's tired and doesn't have the energy she usually does. She even told her teacher that she was tired. So we'll be doing early bedtimes for another week, I think, til she starts feeling like herself again.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, I managed to not get sick. I was exhausted, profoundly, like first-trimester-of-pregnancy tired, but I never got a cough or sniffles or a fever or aches or anything. BigDaddyFish missed almost a week of work running fevers and coughing and aching. That actually ended up being a blessing in disguise, as he was home so I could run my unsick self to the store without having to drag several sick kids with me, so we were able to manage pretty well without having to expose anyone who might have come to help us out. We are still grateful for all of you who offered to bring us food and staples and leave them on our porch for us. We have the best friends in the world.

Here's hoping we got all our sick for the winter out of the way now.

The Little Girl Who Cried Sick

Once upon a time, there was a little girl with a bad case of Idontwannagotoschoolitis. Her mother was a Mean, Nasty Mother, and she made the little girl go to school anyway. The little girl thought she would try to make her mother think she was sick so she could stay home from school. Every day, she told her mother that her stomach hurt, or her head hurt, or her legs felt wobbly. Her mother would feel her head, look in her eyes, check her glands, and send her to school anyway. Her Mean Mother told her that if she wasn't running a fever, bleeding profusely, visibly throwing up on something, squirting poop out of her butt, or snotting thick green goo all over the place, she was going to school. It was tough.

One Monday, the little girl told her mother she felt sick, that her throat hurt. Her mother felt her head, felt her glands, checked for blood and goo, and not finding any, told the girl to drink some juice and go to school. The little girl did, but when she came home from school, she was quiet. Unusually quiet. And at bedtime she went right to bed instead of staying up for hours trying to read by nightlight.

The next morning, the little girl told her mother again that she had a sore throat. She had bags under her eyes and didn't look good. Her mother felt her glands and lo, they were quite swollen. So the mother took the little girl, and her baby brother and little sister, to the pediatrician. They had to wait almost an hour, causing the mother to exhaust her repertoire of kids' songs, and still the baby brother tore the exam room apart. The doctor felt the little girl's glands, looked down the little girl's throat, and said "Ew, no wonder your throat hurts. I bet it's strep."

The mother's blood ran cold. The Mean Nasty Mother happened to have tonsils the size of golf balls, and she lived in fear of the Strep. The doctor dutifully swabbed the little girl's throat and left the mother to come up with more songs to entertain her brood.

The doctor came back 5 minutes later with the bad news. It was Strep. She then checked the baby brother and the little sister, noting that they were clear, and then CHECKED THE MOTHER'S THROAT. Everyone was clean, at least for then. The doctor instructed the little girl to stay home from school the next day, causing the mother to freak right the heck out, because her sister is getting married on Saturday, and it's rather an inconvenient time both for Strep and for having kids home from school. Plus Thursday is a Jewish holiday, so there is no school on Thursday, the day that the little girl is officially authorized to return to school.

So the mother is now spending all her time swabbing down the entire house with bleach, trying to avoid the Plague strep. And the little girl now learned that a real good way to stay home from school is to stick every damn thing she finds in her mouth, even though she is certainly old enough to know better. Of course, since she gave it to all her classmates on Monday when she went to school contagious, she is sure to be able to track it down a few more times before Christmas.

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My friend hokgardner had her baby number 4 on Sunday evening, five weeks too early. Elizabeth is in the NICU, but is a little fighter and is doing better every day. If you could find it in you, hop on over and give hok some loving while she goes through this topsy-turvy time (say that ten times really fast).

And the Silver Medal for High Fever Goes To...

Nemo, for his incredible achievement of 105.3 degrees. We are so very proud of him.

Thankfully he is spent and the fever broke this morning. It was over 105 all weekend. He sat up Saturday morning after the horrible second night of nursing nonstop all night long, pointed to his throat and said "Huwt. Huwt." A more pitiful thing I'm not sure I've seen. So we did the dreaded Saturday morning pediatrician run, which actually wasn't so bad at all. They apparently have a new nurse who we haven't encountered before who was so cute on the phone. "Do you know where our office is?" Uh, yeah. When do you want me to come in? "Well, as soon as you can get here, of course." Very cute.

Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with the dreaded Coxackie virus, nothing they can do for him, keep giving him advil and go around with him attached to your body for the next 48 hours because he is miserable and doesn't want to do anything but nurse. I can't begin to tell you how much fun that was. And can someone please tell me why my kids felt they had to wake me up to tell me that my boob was hanging out no less than three times during the one two-hour non-nap that we were able to take on Saturday afternoon? I was in my own room, for Pete's sake, no one there to see me except them when they came in. Which they had no reason to do at all.

So I've done little but nurse the baby and daydream about my vacation for the past six days. I certainly wasn't doing any sleeping. He was all hot and twitchy and having trouble sleeping and using me as a human pacifier, and we were a bit worried. Only a bit, though, because high fevers run in the family (note that he only received the silver - Trout still holds gold medal status with a blistering 105.6). I'm just exhausted at this point.

So! A little bloggy business! That vacation I mentioned? Because we are Parents of the Year, we are pulling our spawn out of school the second week of school for a boondoggle to the Outer Banks for a week of eating sand and running away from waves. My wonderful next door neighbors will be watching the house, feeding the fish, and watering the plants, but I could use a few blogsitters to keep the Pond lively in my absence. Please let me know if you are interested - I'll need posts by Friday so I can pre-load them. The house we rented doesn't have Internet access (I know!).

In the mean time, you'll have to bide your time for a day or so for me to recover before we get to such titillating topics (HA!) as the fact that Nemo is "still" breastfeeding, my adventure in bus riding following a wonderful lunch downtown, and how I feel about the new school year starting tomorrow.

Sleeping In for the Cure

The Susan G. Komen National Race for the Cure is coming up on June 7 and I won't be able to be there in person. Thanks to the state of my ankle I can't walk it, even though a fellow member of the DC Metro Moms Blog Team will be doing it 8 months pregnant (WOW!). I also have a family obligation out of town on the same day. I was majorly bummed about not being able to be there this year. But leave it to the race organizers to think of everything, because they have an option to Sleep In for the Cure.

You simply register for the race like you normally would. You'll get a shirt and a race number anyway, in case you change your mind, I guess, and a Snooze banner, plus a small gift. Mine was a little box with a travel toothbrush and toothpaste.

My grandmother died in 2006 of breast cancer. She believed in the importance of research for finding cures not just for breast cancer but for any disease that affects us so much that she was participating in a breast cancer drug trial when she died, and she chose to donate her body for medical research after she died. NOTE TO George Washington University Medical Students - I hope you were kind when "learning" from her.

Please join me in supporting the Susan G. Komen National Race for the Cure. Register yourself. If you can't, please consider supporting me by sponsoring me to Sleep In. Even if all you can do is $10, that $10 will be greatly appreciated, and every single dollar adds up to great things. The link should take you directly to my personal page where you can pledge anything you want help reach my modest goal of $500.

My grandmother would want us to be able to say we found a cure.

Skin to Skin

Nemo is at such a fun age right now - 18 months. When he nurses (yes, we're still going strong there) he yanks on my shirt to get it out of the way, and he likes to rub his soft pudgy hand all over my tummy. He will also sometimes take my hand and put it on his head, over his ear, or on his side near his tummy to hold and rub him. He loves to have that skin to skin contact, and while it does present a challenge being discreet while nursing in public, I am more than happy to give him all the comfort and caresses he craves while we are at home.

I love his skin, so soft and smooth and mostly unblemished so far. He's got a couple of scars from his rough and tumble lifestyle already, and he currently has a sizeable scrape on the top right part of his forehead, courtesy of yesterday's attempt to use a stack of cases of water bottles to climb on to reach his balloon from Trader Joe's (Boon!) and subsequent tumble onto the jagged part of our hardwood and crash of a three-quarters full 3 gallon water fire extingusher onto the back of his head. (yeah, that was fun.) I'm not allowed to rub that part right now. So now I just concentrate on rubbing his tummy, and when I sleep I rest my hand on the soft velvety smoothness of his belly as we spoon.

Our skin is such an amazing organ. It really is. It puts up with so much, and still continues to protect us and help us cool down and cleanse ourselves. And we abuse it. We go out without sunscreen. We let our skin burn. We cut it, we stretch it beyond reason with our excesses or with growing new lives. We let it dry out. We curse it when we see the lines and blemishes and other effects of our lifestyles on it. But it keeps on ticking.

Most of the time. I have very fair skin and a long history of burn/peel/burn summers, and my family has a history of skin cancer. Most of them haven't been a big deal; my grandfather in particular had numerous small cancers taken off of his face, but never had a problem. My aunt, who was a synchronized swimmer, had a melanoma on her leg that was successfully treated almost two decades ago, and she's still doing fine. As a result of this history, I go to have my skin checked for signs of trouble each year.

Nine months ago I went in to the dermatologist to have my annual checkup, and at that time one of my moles was removed from my arm and shipped off to biopsy. TUESDAY morning when I got up I had a message on my cell asking me to call the dermatologist's office because they had my biopsy results in and I have to come back in. When I called back I asked her why it took NINE MONTHS to get the results back and she guessed that someone was looking at the records and noticed there was no follow-up. She wouldn't say what exactly was going on, but she said I have to come back in to have it checked and probably frozen. So next Tuesday I will be going in to have the thing checked and possibly frozen off, and at that time I intend to interrogate the doctor and find out why it took 9 months to get my results, especially since something in the back of my brain says I called and was told it was fine, and to find out what the deal is. I'm pretty scared, actually.

So make sure you have your skin checked each year. Make sure it can do its job without hurting you. And whatever you do, follow up carefully, requiring copies of any test results.

Make sure those little ones get lots and lots of skin to skin contact for as long as they need it. The thing is, you need it, too, even if you don't realize it. I know it's a great comfort to me at the moment.

Insult, Have Some Injury, Please, and a Side of Salt for the Wound, Too

The past week and a half has kicked my ass. Done me in. Rode me hard and put me away wet. Really worked me ... alright enough with the cliches already. It was tough.

First it was the lyme disease. Then Monday, my uncle's wife called to tell me her father died. Her parents live in Delaware and because Trout's First Holy Communion was this weekend and that's not exactly something you can reschedule when you have 90 kids getting first communion (it's a big parish), I couldn't go to the memorial service. This may seem like a bit of a distant relation, but my aunt's parents and my grandparents had a relationship that from my experience is kind of rare - they were friends. They had never met outside of the relationship of my uncle and aunt, and wouldn't have if not for them, but they shared a faith and common values, and my aunt's parents were at most of our family gatherings for holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. I feel really bad that I couldn't be there for her mother like she was for us so many times.

Tuesday the doctor called to say the lyme test was negative, which isn't as good news as you might think. She said that a lot of times the test will show negative if it's too early, so she wants to repeat bloodwork in 4-6 weeks, and keep him on the nasty antibiotic for the full 21 days. He doesn't have a fever anymore, but he's still sleeping more than usual, and nursing a ton. I had him weaned down to once a day, at bedtime, before he got sick, but I just can't deny him that comfort right now.

I mentioned before that I've been having issues with my left knee and my right ankle. The left knee has been grinding when I go up and down steps, particularly when I'm carrying something with some weight to it, like full baskets of laundry, or Trout when she's in trouble and being defiant. The right ankle has been swollen and painful, especially along the inside of the ankle and down underneath to the arch of my foot. After months of BigDaddyFish badgering me lovingly suggesting I get it looked at, I did the research to find and orthopedist and I saw him Wednesday. It is a huge sports medicine group with a young staff, which isn't clear when you just look up orthos in the insurance company database. The doctor was younger than me, which is a great way to make yourself feel ancient when you're not.

After X-rays and watching me walk and grabbing my feet and torturing me practicing Hulk Hogan moves examining them, the upshot is that he thinks I have some mild arthritis in my knee. He gave me a CORTISONE SHOT in the knee, and oh my holy hell did that hurt. If I hadn't ever had an epidural where the doctor missed and hit a nerve it would have been the most painful thing ever. He wants to follow up in 4-6 weeks and then do an MRI if it isn't cleared up and not grinding by then. He also suggested I trim down as much as I can, and well, duh, but even he acknowledged it's hard to do that when you can't exercise much because of the knee and the ankle.

Ah, yes, the ankle. The state of my knee was the good news. The short version with my ankle is that I have a tendon that is degenerating for some reason. Frankly I think that they're ALL degenerating to some degree; I've always had loose joints and could hyperextend pretty easily, and I think all the loosening up that you do during pregnancy has just done a number on them. At any rate, I've got a brace for the ankle that I have to wear pretty much all the time, I have to get prescription orthodics made and wear them in a pair of high-end running shoes like New Balance or Asics which I have yet to purchase, and I get to look forward to some sort of full reconstructive surgery sometime in the future. It isn't bad enough to go there yet, though, in part because it's a mite inconvenient at the moment to be down for the count for months, what with the 4 kids and a move and all.

As if all of that wasn't enough, we've been having issues with Little Man being...well, sad and angry and violent. I've been reluctant to blog about it, and I won't discuss most of it here, but we are quite concerned about him and working on getting him what he needs to feel better. In the course of his acting out recently, he threw himself backwards into our woodframe couch, giving himself an enormous goose egg on his head. Later in the week he started to thrash about as BDF picked him up to take him upstairs to time out, causing BDF to drop him onto the edge of the baby jail playyard where Nemo was. Nemo wasn't hurt but Little Man has a huge bruise on his leg, and somehow in his efforts to not drop Little Man, BDF ended up breaking a toe.

The week hasn't been all bad, but it's been wearying. Trout had her First Holy Communion this past weekend, and we had a lovely day with my best friends and three of their children (they have seven total), including my godson. I even had the presence of mind to ask one of them to take a picture of our family, so we have a rare family photo. BDF's been tweaking his work schedule here and there and we've been spending a lot more time together, both as a family and one-on-one, which has been helping Little Man with his issues. We fishsat for our neighbors this weekend, and it reminded us how much we loved having fish around, so we just might get some more before we move, instead of waiting which was the old plan. The weather has been glorious, and I've been able to work out despite the state of my knee and ankle (he said biking and swimming are great, but don't do much else, NO running - I asked him if he realized the impossibility of running when you have four little kids but he told me not to do it anyway) and I've actually enjoyed it, and I am dropping weight slowly. The brace makes it so it doesn't hurt. This past weekend we were able to dig through eight more rubbermaid bins in the basement and get rid of more stuff and stage more stuff to go into storage.

Man, am I tired.

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The Barenaked Ladies have made a cd for kids called Snacktime due to be released tomorrow, and I had the privilege of reviewing it. See what I thought about it over on Props and Pans.

Blymey

Last weekend, when I was changing Nemo for bed, I noticed a strange rashy area under his left arm. It had a raised bump in the middle, and then an irregular shaped halo about a half-inch away from the spot; it was a total of about an inch in diameter. Despite finding a tick on Little Man earlier in the week, I didn't think much of it, especially since there was no bug to go along with it, but when Nemo started to run a fever on Wednesday, I put one (certain exposure to a tick by another family member) and one (rash in armpit) and three (sleepiness, clinginess, and low-grade fever) together and got:

Lyme disease. Most likely.

We spent most of the morning on Thursday going to the pediatrician, the lab, and the pharmacy. We won't have the results of the blood test back til sometime this week, but the pediatrician said that in cases where there is a clear bullseye rash in a preverbal child, they just treat the child as though they have Lyme disease anyway. In a lot of cases there can still be a negative blood test that later tests positive, especially if it is a recent infection, like less than a month. The best prognosis for a full recovery with no lasting effects is quick treatment, so we're glad they do this, even though giving him a foul-tasting antibiotic (because he's allergic to penicillin thanks to my genes) two times a day for 21 days is not high on my list of fun things to do.

I think he's feeling better now, because he's not sleeping so much. Last week he took a 3.5 hour nap on Wednesday when my in-laws were babysitting, and both Wednesday and Thursday he wanted to go upstairs early in the evening and get in bed. We put him on our bed and he put himself to sleep. Pathetically cute, but he was sick. Now he's back to his old I-wont-go-to-bed-without-nummies-for-an-hour self.

Just wanted you to know why I was so quiet.

Tick Tock

Last Saturday we went for a picnic lunch at the park that is adjacent to our property, even though it is a 20 minute drive to get to the park entrance (it's across the water, so we have to drive around the lake). The weather was just glorious, middle seventies, and we had a wonderful lunch and the kids got to run around like maniacs in a big wide open field and we didn't care as long as they didn't get close to the road. The weather had been quite chilly during the preceding week, though, so there weren't many bugs to bother us. It was a glorious day. Of course, I have no pictures - I was too busy just be-ing.

Tuesday morning Little Man was refusing to get up and get ready for school, saying he didn't want to go. So I used my tried and true method of stripping the kid completely naked so he gets cold and has to get up to get dressed, and after I pulled his pants off I noticed a spot in a most uncomfortable place.

"Aw, dude, you really need to wipe better. You got something on your nuts. Go clean it off." He reached down and tried to take it off, and started howling that it hurt. I steeled myself and looked a little closer through one eye, while trying to turn my head away, and saw that it was a bug.

To make a long story very very short, it was a deer tick. On the side of his testicles. I nearly fainted.

BigDaddyFish put vaseline on it to suffocate it. Then, because we can't find the tweezers, we handed Little Man a piece of chocolate and distracted him by talking about the weather and a vacation while I reached down with my fingernails and yanked the damn thing out. I got the whole thing, I am sure.

So now we are watching for the bullseye rash while I google lyme disease obsessively. Silly us thought it was too early for bugs. We're Einsteins that way.

I'b God a Cod in By Dose

I meant to do a post by now, I did, and I do, and I have a good one, I think, but right now my nose is running all the way to Texas (see it, Hok?), my throat is sore, my body is achy, and I can't seem to get enough Ramen and orange juice. I can't take any cold medicine, so I have to just go sleep it off. See you tomorrow, maybe.