It feels a little pathetic that with an extra hour yesterday I still couldn't find time to post. In my partial defense, neither of our children is especially interested in sleep lately. I think that's a lot of what's so hard about two children. Not so much the dealing with two sets of needs at the same time, since often that mostly requires efficiency. Mostly, for me, it's the needs that come serially that really get me, when you think you're done for a little while only to have another kid come along and need something more. Or more to the point, get one child to sleep in the middle of the night only to have another crawl in bed and demand attention. Yawn.

Poor Alec turned out to have an ear infection. That would explain a lot about how he would perk up magnificently when given ibuprofen - it didn't just bring the fever down, it made his ear stop hurting, until it wore off and he would once again collapse to the floor and imitate an air-raid siren. I know there's a school of thought that says that you shouldn't try to bring down a non-dangerous fever or indeed give antibiotics right away for an ear infection, but while I could see doing that with a child that's a bit punky but not acting like they feel too bad, I can't imagine not doing everything I can for a child who can do nothing but wail in misery. It seems like a lot of the same people I see advocating this are the same ones who feel that crying it out is the worst thing ever because children shouldn't experience the least amount of psychological distress. And yet somehow prolonged physical pain is just fine.

Anyway, he's on the mend and much happier now. Now if we can only kill the persistent UTI K has been carrying around for more than a month. She's had two rounds of antibiotics, and just two days off the last round, she started complaining of pain and her urine started smelling like a sewer again. Sigh. And of course this was late Thursday, so we couldn't get the urine collection cup to get her pee tested until Friday, and it takes a couple days for the lab report to come back, so I don't see getting her on more meds before the end of the week. She's not in acute distress, which is why I'm not pushing for immediate medication, but I wish we could just kick this for good.