So! Since last Tuesday, we have:
-bought a car
-quit my online job
-driven to Michigan.

So just a regular, boring week. We're at my mother's right now, but we're driving up to B's parents' tomorrow, where there is only dial-up Internet. So I will update more when we're back in the land of wi-fi and expand a bit on the above. Hopefully now that I'm only working one job, I'll find a lot more time to update regularly.

Two

Last Thursday, my gigantic baby turned two. I don't mean gigantic so much as in "My tiny baby is so gigantic!" but in that he routinely dwarfs the three-year-olds we meet. He is a big, solid kid. He is also our sweet, happy goofy baby. Happy birthday baby. You're the best two-year-old in the world.



But maybe not ready for potty-training yet.

Six

My baby turned six last Tuesday. SIX.

It's hard to believe how big and capable she's gotten. And even more than her physical capabilities, she starting to develop the sort of empathy and ability to think about others that makes a parent delighted to discover they might not be raising a little sociopath after all. And despite spending pretty much all day with her for the past six months, I'm enjoying her company enough to sign up for another year of homeschooling. She's funny and creative and an excellent big sister.

That all adds up to a pretty great kid. Happy Birthday sweetheart.



I would like to note that she looks about 8 FEET LONG in this picture, which is pretty much accurate for how she's growing these days.

K's fever continued unchanged all week, worrying me no end until Friday, it magically got lower and we able to get her temperature down to normal with ibuprofen. She still has the cough that developed towards the middle of the week and needs a daily nap, but is definitely getting better. Whew.

She does have another UTI, which we found out about only because we called the doctor on Thursday. She's on a new antibiotic that she's only been on once before and loved, because it tastes good, is once a day and gave us a full three weeks before the next UTI, which is quite a record these days. So yay for that. Pretty much everything else about our interactions with the medical community has me livid though. Reasons include, in no particular order:

1. The fact that her pediatrician doesn't use the strips for dipping into urine and immediately seeing if there's an infection. No, we have to wait for the urine to get sent to the lab, which takes a minimum of three days and nothing gets prescribed if she doesn't have a fever or is in pain. It does mean, however, that the infection gets to party on in her bladder for another three days before we do anything about it.
2. Every single doctor that has said, "She should be on daily antibiotics," yet not actually prescribed them. I absolutely agree. She should be on daily antibiotics, especially if it's what the urologist thinks it is. At our last urologist visit, the nurse practitioner we were seeing noted that the urologist had written orders for daily antibiotics in K's chart, but they didn't have a phone number for a pharmacy. And yet she didn't give me the daily prescription the urologist clearly thought K should have. Everyone seems to be in agreement on the daily antibiotics issue. And yet here I stand, my hand completely full of no prescriptions. WHY CAN'T SOMEONE JUST GIVE THEM TO US ALREADY?
3. I have a special hate-on for the nurse practitioner, who gave us the antibiotic I told her over and over doesn't work, even if the lab report says the bacteria they found can be killed by it and then failed to call us back after two days of us calling repeatedly to say that it wasn't working and K was in pain. I can put up with a certain amount of distraction, and an office where I have to wait for two hours just to check in. But my child in pain is unacceptable.

*****

We spent a quiet and sleepy Father's Day. B doesn't care about it too much, which has been good for me since I haven't been up to doing much the past three years. But this year I pulled it together to at least help K get him a gift and have a low-key sort of celebration. I've made it that far at least. I'm not at the point yet where I can participate in Facebook memes or post happy reminiscences about my father, but I'm not in the mood to talk about how much I miss him. Just a sort of carefully neutral fatherless Father's Day.

Weather continuing hot and humid

Verdict of the doctor: no signs of any bacterial infections in the various orifices, probably a virus. Come back if the fever isn't gone by Friday. She took a urine sample, but K isn't having any of her normal symptoms, so I would be surprised if it were the primary cause of all this (it wouldn't shock me if there were another infection brewing, since when hasn't there been one brewing in the past nine months?).

This evening, K napped on the couch next to me and I could feel the heat radiating off of her without even touching her. The immortal UTI aside, we've been extremely lucky with our childrens' health. Neither of them has had a virus last for more than a couple days or an infection that hasn't cleared up promptly with antibiotics. A case of bronchitis as a baby has given Alec reactive airway disease, which means he gets a couple weeks of wheezing every time he gets a cold but nothing that a few nebulizer treatments won't help.

This is the longest either of them has been this sick in such a worrying way. I know it's probably a virus that she'll finally kick in the next couple days, or we'll get a call saying she does have another infection, but it's hard not to let my mind go in worrying directions the longer this goes on with no change.

Something is better than nothing, right?

1. K and I got up too early last Wednesday morning and went to the children's hospital for another attempt at a vcug. They gave her versed this time, which makes children very sleepy and mellow, and thank goodness, because K was freaking out again. I was impressed with the nurse who gave her the medication, who was the right combination of kind and tough, and managed to get K to willingly take the medicine when she was more interested in curling up in a little ball and hiding her face. The doctor had warned me that she was on the older end of children that Versed works well for, and it just doesn't work at all for some children. I held her in a rocking chair for a while, talking about her grandmother's trip to Alaska and other distracting things, until the nurse came back in and I looked down and realized her eyes were closed. Clearly working for her, thank goodness. It was all pretty easy after that, since while she wasn't really asleep, she was pretty happily zoned out. Thankfully the test went very quickly (and everything is fine, or at least, what they were testing for isn't the cause of the UTIs). K was quite amusingly goofy and wobbly for quite a while.

We couldn't get an appointment with the urologist to actually go discuss this test until August. To say I am ... unhappy with this doctor's office is putting it mildly.

2. The last day of school was last Friday, and we celebrated by getting up waaay too early to go to Hershey Park for an end-of-year celebration with our cyber school. I have to say, if you're the amusement park type, Hershey Park is a pretty good one. Lots of rides, including water rides for hot days, clean as a whistle and the extra bonus of chocolate.

The end of the school year deserves its own post for purposes of reflection on successes, failures, plans for next year and general navel-gazing. We are planning on homeschooling again next year. But meanwhile, we're enjoying the general slothfulness of the first week of summer break.

3. Both of the children were out of sorts on Friday - Alec had woken up obscenely early on Friday (a general trand last week - what the hell child?), fell asleep on the way to daycare and when I carried him in and set him down on the couch, he opened his eyes just long enough to wiggle into a more comfortable position and went back out. He was asleep again when I picked him up, and he stayed asleep when I carried him out to the car, during the twenty minutes we waited for B to get out of work and for another hour after we got home.

K, meanwhile, had had a rather fragile day and was cuddled up with the sitter when I picked her up and inclined to be tearful for no reason any of us could see. I was utterly perplexed, since she loves the sitter, until we got home and she cuddled up to me on the couch and I suddenly realized she was burning up. We took her temperature : 103. Then we stuck the thermometer under Alec's arm and got the same result.

Oh. Well, that would explain it. They were both inclined to lie around a lot yesterday, although they would both perk up with application of ibuprofen. Alec was pretty much better last night. K, poor bunny, still had a fever tonight, and will probably go into the doctor tomorrow if she's not any better tomorrow. I keep quizzing her about any possible symptom of another UTI, but so far she seems clear. It's almost certainly a virus, given her brother was sick too and her father and I aren't feeling too chipper either, but it's hard not to be paranoid when you're constantly dealing with a chronic illness.

It was a very stinky day

Friday, we discovered the source of the horrifying smell in the car was from a gallon of milk we had missed bringing in with the rest of the groceries that were purchased on Monday. Oh my. It took all week for it to get to the point that it actually burst, but burst it did and thank goodness it was in a cloth bag, because who knows how well a paper bag would have done. As it was, we wound up deciding that preserving a $1 grocery bag was not worth the work it would take to salvage it and threw it away.

That afternoon, on the way to pick B up from work, Alec threw up in the car. I think it was a combination of too long in the car and the heat, because he was perfectly chipper, albeit in possession of an unspeakably gross shirt. And once I got him into the library, I discovered the poopy diaper.

What a shame I had forgotten to bring the diaper bag.

Thankfully, we did have wipes in the car, so I cleaned off his carseat as well I could, and since the fabric is a decidedly unnatural artificial fiber, it didn't really soak in. But as for spare clothes or even a clean diaper - out of luck. This is how Alec wound up running around the library wearing nothing but a diaper cover I had rinsed out in the bathroom sink, with his pants stuffed inside to substitute for a diaper.

Say what you will about the relatives advantages of cloth versus disposable diapers, but cloth will definitely serve you better in this sort of emergency. I freely admit this is not the first time I have diapered my children with a piece of their own clothing, and as long as you have a useable cover, it works just fine to get you home.

Well, that was fun

I took K to get her VCUG on Monday, to try and help figure out why she's getting so many infections. Instead, K FREAKED out. It hadn't been a good sign the night before when she had thrown a massive tantrum over something trivial and then cried herself to sleep over how scared she was. But I was hoping when she walked into the hospital and sat in the waiting room without a problem that it would be okay. Sigh. We got into the procedure room, we were handed a hospital gown and she absolutely lost it.

Thankfully, since we were at a children's hospital, they place an emphasis on not traumatizing small children, and the suggestion was quickly made to reschedule so we could perform it with sedation. I suspect this is pretty routine, since absolutely nobody who I talked to about rescheduling afterwards acted surprised. The scheduler in the urologist's office said sympathetically, "Yeah, you look like you put up a fight."

Of course, I still have to get her back in the hospital. Normally, I feel it better to be as honest with children as is developmentally appropriate, so I had told K about the test, emphasizing over and over again that they would use something so it wouldn't hurt. However, we all can see how that went. I find myself wondering if it would have been better not to tell her the details so she wouldn't have time to develop anxiety about it beforehand. Unfortunately, that's a bell we can't unring, so short of cold-cocking her before carrying her into the hospital, we're going to have to deal with more pre-test anxiety and freaking out until they give her the mellow juice.

Anyway, two days later I still feel emotionally wrung out from the ordeal, plus now I get to look forward to trying to do it again. I had really been hoping Monday would be our last day of warming the waiting room chairs at that hospital for hours at a time for a while.

Of course, the real question is - should I bring along the camera to record her as she recovers from the sedation, in hopes of getting a video to rival David After Dentist?*








*Note: before anyone decides to flame me, I wouldn't actually do this. Although I clearly don't have a problem sharing my childrens' lives over the internet, I feel like turning your child's vulnerable moment into a cottage industry is where my personal line for exploiting your child gets crossed.

Books so far this year

I took a stab at keeping track of my reading this year, but here we are over a third of the way through the year and the list is getting too long to be able to get into every specific book in any detail. Fortunately, I haven't so much been reading new books as reading several new authors, which makes this much more efficient.

Rhys Bown, Her Royal Spyness series : This is a mystery series, starring Lady Georgianna, a young noblewoman living in London in the 1930s. Great-granddaughter to Queen Victoria and 34th in line to the throne. Unfortunately, her branch of the royal family is quite broke and her dreadful sister-in-law makes the family home in Scotland unbearable, so she is attempting to live independently while being too well-born to be able to earn a living. She scrapes by while periodically getting called upon by Queen Mary to do various favors, like attempt to distract the Prince of Wales from that dreadful Wallis Simpson. But really none of this gets across how hysterically funny these books are. Imagine the love child of P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers (conveniently ignoring the fact that Dorothy was FAR too proper to do something so scandalous) with a generous dollop of Cold Comfort Farm (there's something very Flora Poste-ish about Georgie), and you begin to get the tone of these books.

Jennifer Crusie : I admit, I've been on a kick of light reading. She's a romance author, but her books are intelligent and well-written, and usually very funny. Her female protagonists tend to be intelligent women in their late 30s with real bodies who enjoy eating, as opposed to Barbie dolls in their early 20s. Her male protagonists aren't asssholes who make you wonder why anyone would ever want to get within 15 feet of them. There are very few moments of even slightly dubious consent. They're really about as good as a romance novel can get, particularly when you're in a mood for light and entertaining but don't want to have to turn your feminism off.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games trilogy : And now for something completely different, a dystopian future where teenagers are chosen by lottery once a year to fight each other to the death for everybody's entertainment on tv. Hijinks ensue! Need I say that it isn't a good idea to get too attached to any of the characters? Truly, not so much the series I would recommend for someone who wants something light and easy. But much like Battlestar Galactica, despite the fact that I'm generally feeling too unsettled about the state of the world to be able to enjoy dystopia, this is just too damn good for me to put down.

100 years of waiting

I took K to the urologist last week, to see if we could find an answer to why she gets a new UTI every time she turns around. We got a maybe answer (this is the part where I hedge because I'm starting to feel like K's getting to the age where she deserves some privacy on these issues. So rather than get into the whole saga, Google "dysfunctional elimination" if you want to), and get to go back in a couple weeks for a delightful test called a VCUG, which involves a urinary catheter. I anticipate great fun getting K to sit still for that. Sigh. It will be at a children's hospital, so they should be used to dealing with uncooperative children.

Mostly, I'm hoping the office staff will be a little more on the ball this time around. We had a 9:45 appointment and didn't get home until 1:30, due to little things like the fact that it took over an HOUR just to check us in. Then we saw the actual doctor for about 30 seconds and a highly distracted nurse practitioner the rest of the time, if by "see" you mean "Spent five minutes someplace else for every two minutes she spent with us." And part of that approximately ten fragmented minutes was spent informing K that she needed to give up what the NP saw as a bad habit (completely unrelated to K's urinary tract) and outlined the behavior reward system we were apparently going to implement. All without every even directly speaking to me, the parent sitting right there in the room, let alone thinking that maybe things like this should be up to me, K'S MOTHER. Plus we already use a good bahavior chart, so her stupid star chart would be kind of redundant.

So now I have another reason to want the UTIs to end, so I don't have to keep finding myself wasting my quickly waning youth in a waiting room while waiting to get passive aggressive unwanted parenting advice.