Abscess makes the heart grow fonder

You would think that the amount of free time I had during our snow week would have resulted in more writing, but I got distracted.

Wednesday, I was tired for reasons I couldn't quite explain, especially since I had gotten to sleep in.

Thursday, my sinuses and throat hurt, and the glands under one side of my jaw were swelling. So apparently I was tired Wednesday because I was getting sick. I assumed I was in for a bad cold, since that's usually what it means when my glands swell.

Friday, the glands under my jaw were insanely swollen, but my nose was only mildly sniffly, making me wonder what was up. My research turned up the panicking possibility of a tooth abscess, but I dismissed it because of the many parts of my head that hurt at that point, my teeth were not among them.

Saturday, B went to work because I thought I was okay. Then I made the mistake of attempting to chew my breakfast, sending pain through my entire head and realized that there was swelling under my tongue, which made me start to think this was bacterial, not viral. So I called him home so I could seek out medical help. My doctor recommended a Minute Clinic, so off we went (capsule review of the Minute Clinic: pretty good. Quick service for a reasonable price, and while I wouldn't go for a complex medical problem, if you have a weekend bladder infection or suchlike I would definitely recommend them). My sinuses hurt, but not when the nurse pressed on them, so a sinus infection was ruled out. The rapid strep test was negative as well, so while she took another swab to send to the lab, she said it was probably a virus, sending me away with the usual useless advice for salt water gargling and ibuprofen or Tylenol. Meanwhile, I spent the evening researching how much ibuprofen was considered an overdose and finally took some of the leftover painkiller from my c-section so I could get some sleep.

Sunday, things finally came to a head quite literally when a boil suddenly swelled up on my gum and then popped, draining quite a bit of nasty stuff and giving me almost instant relief. Aha! Not a tooth abscess but a gum abscess, where a pocket of infection decides to take up residence in your gums. I suppose I should have realized that sooner, because the inside of my mouth and my jaw did hurt, but everything hurt at that point. It was hard to distinguish what might be caused by an infection in my mouth versus what pain was coming from the sheer bulk of swollen, painful glands under my jaw putting pressure on everything else. And of course, there was the sore throat, which didn't seem to jibe with anything else.

So Monday, I went to the dentist and the gum abscess was confirmed, which was a relief because the best-case scenario treatment for a tooth abscess is a root canal, but for a gum abscess that was draining on its own, I got antibiotics. And on Tuesday, I got a call from the Minute Clinic telling me my strep test was positive, slotting the other piece of the puzzle in place. That would explain the sore throat and the fact that gum abscesses often come along with gum disease, which I don't have. I guess the bacteria from my throat travelled into an opportune place in my gum and decided to party.

So almost a week later, I'm mostly better. It's really astonishing how much misery one small spot of infection can cause, but there's nothing like an infection to let you know just how connected all of the nerves in your face are. I've lost nearly ten pounds because of how much moving my jaw has hurt.* Right now, I'm down to ibuprofen every eight hours, a bit of a sore throat and one last swollen sore spot under my jaw. And thankfully, I can mostly eat things that require at least some chewing, instead of my previous staple diet of soup and pudding. However, I only have one day of antibiotics left, which makes me worry that it's all going to come galloping back as soon as they're done, so I'm calling the doctor on Monday.

So that's my sick note for the week. I had been planning to try and write every day as an exercise for Lent and I will try to actually start that tomorrow, but the first few days of Lent were hopeless, since I was fasting instead.

*It's not like this is really a surprise to me, but it's such a sad sign of how screwed up our society is about weight that I should get so much admiration for losing weight by being too sick to eat for a week, even when people know how I lost the weight. Yeesh, people. But thinner is healthier, right? Because starvation is so very healthy.

Digging out

It's been a bizarre week - snow days for all of us Wednesday and Thursday, a snow day for K and me on Friday while B had a free day that day even though his library was open. Then I was sick enough this weekend that B didn't work on Saturday and I didn't work today. Tomorrow is a holiday. And of course yet more snow is forecast for tomorrow, although there isn't much accumulation expected so we have a decent chance of finally getting back to normal Tuesday.

As completely unplanned week-long vacations go, it was fairly pleasant, aside from the whole being awfully sick on my part. As I've said before, we don't get a lot of time off together, so it's nice to be able to have two parents home for multiple days in a row. It was also nice that we weren't too trapped in the house after Wednesday. We probably should have stayed home Thursday, since getting out of our alley full of snow just melted enough to be incredibly slippery required the help of four burly neighbors and half an hour of getting stuck over and over again. But once we were out of our driveway, we were committed, since we couldn't leave our car blocking the alley until the snow melted, and we had managed to get just enough past our driveway that it would have been really difficult to get back in. There was no way out but forward, so that's the way we went, in one of the most terrifying drives I've ever made, jouncing down the alley with the car shimmying the entire way and the steering wheel attempting to whip out of my hands.

And now, a couple snow-bound observations:

- Before I had a princess-obsessed four-year-old, I hadn't seen many of the Disney princess movies since I was five or six.* Having watched them all now around eight and a half billion times, I can say two things: 1, Snow White is quite possibly the weirdest cartoon I've ever seen, and given how much anime I watched, that's saying something. Fortunately, K didn't like it, because I think it could start giving me nightmares. 2, I knew Enchanted was a good parody when I saw it, but I didn't realize quite how spot-on and brilliant it was. My goodness - who knew Disney could have such a good sense of humor about itself?

- When introducing Alec to solids, I decided to skip rice cereal to try and avoid the constipation K got on it. So he's been getting oatmeal, fruit and yogurt, and has been pooping four times a day. Um, mission accomplished?

* I nearly managed to convince K to go see The Princess and the Frog by telling her about when I went to see Cinderella and Snow White as a little girl. She's been steadfastly refusing to see it (despite wanting Tiana merchandise, of course) because she's afraid of the dark theatre, and I told her how I had felt safe in the theatre because my daddy was with me. I nearly had her, and of course that was just about the last weekend it was playing around here and that's when the snow hit. Sigh. What's the good of a princess-obsessed daughter if you can't go see the latest Disney princess movie?

Snow day, part deux

28.5 inches of snow fell on us this weekend. It was actually pretty nice, except for the being trapped in the house. All of the city buildings were closed all weekends, so we were both home all weekend, a very rare occurrence around these parts. It was really a nice, relaxing day. We don't have many of those both parents around, nothing to do kind of days. B took K out to play in the snow, we all had hot chocolate and we watched way too many Disney princess movies. And thankfully, by Sunday the roads were clear enough for us to get out of the house so nobody was driven to Disney princess-induced psychosis (All Cinderella and no play makes Jack a dull boy?).

The benefit of the last gigantic storm is that we know the drill now. The main roads are clear and residential roads are packed down enough to be passable, and despite this, the public schools were closed today. But the benefit of the clear roads is that we were able to get out of the house for the afternoon so I wasn't trapped alone in the house with two small children all day.

And now Snow Day, part tres is arriving tomorrow evening, with 10-20 inches expected. At this point, I'm unbelievably thankful school will be open tomorrow, because I'm not sure if K will have it again for the rest of the week. I would be very surprised indeed if B will have work on Wednesday; my only question is if they will close the libraries early tomorrow evening, given when the snow is supposed to start. I should make sure to get to the grocery store tomorrow to get more milk and bread, but other than that, we are well set for food and entertainment during the coming captivity.

Growing up in the lake effect zone of Lake Michigan, this is a large, but not unusual amount of snow for back home. We would get a couple of storms like this every year, and I'm not even sure if we would have gotten a snow day out of this in my school district (we didn't bus many students from rural areas, the normal reason schools closed for snow in our area. We were actually most likely to close school for ice). The difference was, of course, that we got steady snow all winter long and were well equipped and practiced with dealing with this amount of snow. I really don't blame Philadelphia, where last month a local news program had an entire segment on how it was so unbelievably cold that people had to bundle up to go outside and were staying inside (cold weather in January! How shocking!), for not being quite so prepared and we're doing pretty well all things considered. People further south of us are having a much harder time with the same amount of snow.

I suppose snow is all a matter of perspective. I was re-reading some of the Little House books at work the other week, and if you want perspective on winter - WELL. Leaving aside The Long Winter, I remember a passage in These Happy Golden Years where everyone was outside happily playing because the cold snap had broken and it was only -20 F. And when you think about living through temperatures colder than that in a wooden house with no insulation heated with a single wood stove...brr, is all I can say. There was also the passage in an earlier book where they had moved to town for the winter but Pa hadn't finished the roof yet, where everyone woke up covered in snow. Oh my. This would be why I don't live in North Dakota. And why I enjoy forced air heating. Being stuck inside with two small children for the rest of the week seems like a small thing when we have a functioning furnace, plenty of varied foods, electricity and ample entertainment.

Alec at seven months

My baby is seven months old now. He's energetic, busy, cheerful and GIGANTIC. I'm not sure exactly how much he weighs, but I recently had to move him up to large size Bumkins diapers covers because the mediums were juuuuust barely stretching to fasten, and they go up to 22 pounds. Given that he was 21 pounds 4 ounces three weeks ago, I think 22 pounds now is a pretty good guess. As far as I can tell, he's storing ten pounds in each thigh and five in each cheek (the observant will note that adds up to thirty pounds. My baby scoffs at the laws of space/time and basic arithmetic). He is firmly in 12 month clothes, as my last attempt to get one last wear out of his 9 month clothes this week resulted in freezing his meaty little shins, off the should shirts and onesies that when snapped under the crotch endangered our future granchildren. Unfortunately, since it is now February, he may have to spend the rest of the winter in swimsuits, given the current offerings in the children's clothing section.

In gross motor milestones, he can stand for a while holding onto something, and it trying very hard to pull himself up. Unfortunately, the thing he pulls up on most is the long, low plastic toy that is only eight inches tall, so he pulls himself up and then topples right over it. Given a while, I'm sure he could pull up to standing if he was doing with something taller, but he would have to figure out how to get over to it first. He has absolutely no interest in rolling around on the floor or doing any of the inchworming that's usually the precursor to crawling. Which makes it really inconvenient for him that he really wants to be on the move. He can sit in one place and play indefinitely, and I wouldn't be surprised if was one of those babies who got around by scooting on his butt. Every once in a while, he enthusiastically flings himself forward (optimally, when this would catapult him right off the bed) and does his best on-land Esther Williams impression, and he will also periodically lean forward until he winds up on his hands and knees, completely at a loss as to what to do next, but mostly he's a sitter.

He has taken enthusiastically to solid foods and is up to two solid meals a day, usually yogurt for one and fruit and cereal for the other. I've been more cavalier about the rate at which I introduce new foods than I was with K - partly because I'm not dealing with known food allergies like I was with her, partly because the rules we set up around babies and food seem unnecessarily arcane and the actual research is mixed. So far, no problems. He's even enthusiastically eating finger foods - little cereal puffs that melt down to nothing in the mouth, which he scoops up in his fist, but then holds between thumb and forefinger to put in his mouth, showing off his developing pincer grip. As of today, he has six teeth, two on bottom and four on top, which aren't yet very effective in eating but quite effective for taking wicked painful bites out of his parents.

He is a colossal flirt, tilting his head and smiling winsomely at us when we aren't paying enough attention to him. When we do interact with him, he beams with pleasure and babbles enthusiastically. Tonight, when I came into a room and he heard my voice, he threw himself backwards off of B's lap so he could greet me upside-down. The flip side of this is the galloping case of separation anxiety he's developed in the past few days. He'll still play independently for quite a while, although not nearly as much as he used to, but if we walk into sight, he immediately realizes how desperately he's missed us and needs to be with us. And his woe when we leave the room is epic.

This is such an energetic, happy age, and we have such a sweet, happy boy. If only we could keep him this way for a while longer:



(More pictures in the usual place)

I spent last Friday at work discovering just how much of an appalling mess our shelf list and card catalog are in. I spent literally all day trying to file cards and in general finding five cards to refile in the correct place for every one I filed initially. And now I get to figure out a way to diplomatically put the elderly volunteer who filed those cards out to pasture.

For those of you who are trying to dredge up from the dim recesses of your memories how card catalogs work, every book at minimum has three cards - author, title and shelf list, the shelf list being the list that reflects the order of books on, well, the shelf (there are also cards for each subject heading, and series, and artists, ad infinitum. Basically any way you would want to find a book, you need a card. But of course, since creating and filing cards takes time and space, you're always constrained by not wanting to create any more cards than necessary, even though since you can't do a keyword search, they're the only way you will find a book. Do you begin to see what a revolutionary thing the computerized catalog was?). But as I was going through the catalog, I would find all three cards shoved in together in the shelf list, so instead of being able to look up a book by its title or author to find out where it is on the shelf, you could only find a book by already knowing where it belongs on the shelf. This is... not helpful.

The volunteer who was doing such a creative filing job hasn't been in for the past six months, and while he was going to come in that day, we weren't expecting him to do any work. So when I mentioned to my manager that he shouldn't file cards any more, she said that it probably wouldn't be an issue. Instead, after catching up with my manager, he came over to me and asked if he should start filing some cards. Argh! I said something non-committal, and my manager asked him to help double-check her accounting with the petty cash, avoiding this issue for that week. But he's planning on coming in next week. Double argh.

Volunteers are a great thing for any cash-strapped organization. But the problem with them as opposed to a paid employee is that it's a lot harder to fire them for incompetence without feeling like an absolute heel. He's a sweet man, and I really don't know how to say that we don't want his help any more. I'm cravenly hoping that my manager will be the bad guy in this.

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On a completely different topic, tonight's dinner (recipe courtesy of a Facebook friend) didn't taste exactly like the Zuppa Toscana at Olive Garden, but it was darn tasty, and surprisingly quick and easy. It helped that I've been trying to be better about meal planning recently, and doing things like making meals that can use the same ingredient more than once, so I can cut up a bunch of potatoes or cook up a bunch of chicken to use over a couple meals and have ingredients ready when I go to cook.

Note: this recipe makes a tankload of soup. I cut it in half and still had to use two pots when one was getting overfull. I would cut it down to about a third if you don't want leftovers for the next five years.

Ingredients:
3 (14 ounce) cans of chicken broth
9 cups water
3-5 pieces bacon
1 lb italian sausage, loose ground
4 large russet potatoes; skin on and cut into bite sized chunks
1 large white onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2/3 cup half-and-half
1/2-11/2 teaspoon salt (to taste)
1/2-1 Tablespoon black pepper (to taste)
1/2-1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
2 cups kale leaves, chopped (optional)

Directions:

1. In a large stock pot combine the water, chicken broth, salt and potatoes and set to a low boil.

2. In a separate pan fry up the bacon until lightly crispy and set aside; save the bacon grease.

3. In the same pan used to cook the bacon add the Italian sausage, onion and olive oil and simmer on low until the sausage is browned and the consistency of hamburger.

4. Chop the bacon into small shreds and add to the cooked sausage, then add everything into the soup pot.

5. Mix the garlic, powders and half-and-half into the soup pot and simmer, covered, for 30 minutes.

6. 5 Minutes before serving mix in the chopped kale leaves.

Tired snippets

* The combination of working both days this weekend, then having everyone home for MLK Day Monday has left me deeply confused about what day of the week it is. Not that I'm complaining - it was nice to be able to have a day off together after working all weekend, and the short week is an extra treat. But I'm drifting through the week never sure what today is - Tuesday? Wednesday? A week from next Friday? Who can tell at this point?

* After a dry December, a lot of our favorite shows are back - Chuck, Leverage, Burn Notice, White Collar and Psych. The alert will notice a certain similarity in all of those titles. I would say our appetite for hour-long spy/caper/mystery dramedies is completely sated for the moment.

* Speaking of caper/mysteries, we did manage to make it to a movie while we in Michigan, and saw Sherlock Holmes. We emjoyed it immensely, and not just because it was the first time we've been out together without a child since the night before Alec was born. It helped, of course, that Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law between them have 50 pounds of charisma in a five pound bag. It oozes out of their eyeballs, and they could make people enjoy watching them play Quaker Meeting. But the movie itself was pretty good. This is where I admit that I was never able to get into the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was younger. But I enjoyed watching a Holmes who was clearly flawed as well as brilliant, who showed the negative as well as positive sides of his genius.

* The other day, K brought a baby over to me and holding its hands behind its back, she asked me to tie them together. When I asked why, she said, "She's going to jail." Well. I tied the prisoner's hands good and tight. Far be it from me to stand in the way of the mighty hand of Justice.

*******

Last night was a poop in the bathtub kind of night, both literally and figuratively. It was the sort of night with two wailing children, two aggravated parents and a disgusting mess to clean up. It was a continuation K's ongoing poop issues, and I am sorry to report that we did not deal with it with the sort of patience and grace one would hope for. It wasn't really her fault, yet it was next to impossible not to take some of our frustration out on her. I wasn't terribly sympathetic to her tears, I said things that at the time were meant to point out the consequences of her actions but in hindsight were more like rubbing it in, and she didn't get a bedtime story, which wasn't consciously meant to be a punishment, but I'm sure it felt like it to her.

We all have evenings like that, and I'm sure there will be more. One of the things that I'm becoming more aware of as K gets older is that she's now old enough that she's going to be able to remember a lot of the things that are happening her. Six months later, she's still talking about the day the window shattered in the door, and I suspect it's going to be a lasting memory (a couple weeks ago, as we were going out the door, she patiently explained to me that I needed to be careful when I closed it). The window didn't shatter because I was angry and slammed the door. It was already cracked and I had my hand on the window as I closed the door, so I suspect it would have happened anyway. But I find myself wondering if K is going to remember it as the day Mommy got angry and smashed a window. It's a chastening thought.

But what can you do? Today, before I put K in the car after school, I asked her for a hug and apologized for having such a grumpy night last night, and that I know she doesn't have poop issues on purpose. I can hope that if she's going to remember the times I traumatize her, she'll remember these moments too.

About a boy

I realized this week that I'm so late in posting Alec's six month update that it's almost time for the seven month update. I was waiting for his six month well baby appointment, which didn't happen until this week thanks to Christmas and our vacation. So here are a few notes until next week.

1. He is 27.25 inches tall, 21 pounds, 4 ounces, and has a head circumference of 18 inches. That's really quite large all around, maintaining his spot in the 90th percentile from two months ago. We don't really realize how big he is until we see him with other babies. On vacation, we met a five-month-old whom he dwarfed and a seven-month-old who was closer to his size, but still smaller than him despite being a month older.

It's a little odd when you have a big baby how people congratulate you as if it were your superior parenting that made him that big. Really, all we do is feed him, which is what any competent parent does. The rest is our obviously superior genes. :)

2. He started sitting on his own last month, but has really taken off with it this month, happily sitting for long periods without toppling over.

3. He has discovered the upper reaches of his vocal register, and the rest of us have lost approximately 25 percent of our hearing.

4. Aside from practicing his dog-summoning shrieks, his main form of communication these days is raspberries. He does them when he's cheerful and when he's annoyed. It's as if there wasn't enough saliva coming out of his mouth in drool, so he had to start spraying it around.

5. He's developing his pincer grip. Ask me how I know.*

6. We started solids this month, which he seems to be enjoying quite a bit. We're not being hugely consistent about giving them to him though, because I've discovered I'm just so bored with the spooning the pap into the baby and the bibs and the mess and the spitting. I just want to throw some food at him and let him feed himself. Sorry kid. That's life as a second child. However, he downed four ounces of pears mixed with oatmeal tonight, lunging and snapping at the spoon like a baby hawk, so I should probably work harder at getting him solids every day.



*He reminds me of an old Looney Tunes cartoon that was a guide to dog breeds. One segment went: "This is a doberman pinscher. And this is Doberman" Cue dog getting an evil grin on its face and making pinching motions as it walked off-screen, followed by a scream. Now imagine that with my nipples.

About that Facebook meme

I got an e-mail yesterday morning, telling me to post my bra color into my Facebook status as a way to raise "awareness" for breast cancer. I use quotes because I didn't participate because I couldn't see how calling attention to my bra without actually including any information about breast cancer would raise awareness of it. I mean, posting my bra color with a link to the Susan G. Komen foundation website or suchlike would raise awareness. But just my bra color would raise awareness of, well, my bra.

In my web meanderings today, I found people who agreed with me for more or less the same reasons, and I was prepared to pretty much forget it as another stupid Facebook thing. And then I found a post by a breast cancer survivor explaining why it was a colossally insensitive to breast cancer survivors, the people it was ostensibly trying to help:

"Other cancer survivors joined in, telling me that they felt left out too. After all, this was ostensibly an effort to raise awareness of breast cancer — but one in which breast cancer survivors themselves could not participate, and were reminded (as if we needed a reminder) that we didn’t need bras anymore, that most basic undergarment of women everywhere, that symbol of sexuality, for the simple reason that we had already sacrificed our breasts in a hail mary attempt to keep the rest of our bodies from dying of cancer."

I know it's late to be posting this, since that meme was so yesterday. But if you were just getting the e-mail today, or didn't have time to post yesterday and were going to today, please don't. And maybe this should serve as a cautionary tale about how when well-meaning people try to help a cause, they should check with the people actually affected by it to find out if it would actually be helpful.

Travel notes

We arrived home last night, a day earlier than planned. It wasn't so much the heavy snow that was supposed to fall on Illinois and Indiana Wednesday night and all day Thursday - six inches of snow isn't so bad if you can drive out of it. But looking at the forecast made it clear that we would be chasing the weather system the entire way home. Blowing snow for 800 miles isn't my idea of a good time.

So although we're bitterly disappointed not to see our friends in Champaign, we instead made a stop in Indiana for dinner with friends on Wednesday and then went on to spend the night in Columbus. Our trip yesterday was cold but dry, only marred by Alec's discovery of the upper registers of his vocal range. Between the high pitched shrieks and the teething induced biting, I'm beginning to understand what it's like to live with a pterodactyl. Without the flying, that is.

It was lovely to have a day off today, before we embark on our work-filled weekend. We mostly spent it doing exciting things like getting groceries, but it was nice to have two parents for the day.

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A quote from K today: "I don't want to wear a dinosaur shirt! I'm a girl!" Then she went and gave one of her previously beloved dinosaurs to her little brother because he's a boy and boys like dinosaurs (well, he liked chewing on the dinosaur). Apparently all she likes is princesses and ponies.

That sound you hear would be the breaking of her feminist parents' hearts. Sigh. It's a phase. I know it's a phase. And at least it's not as unpleasant as her other phase of the moment, which involves poop withholding.

Midwestward ho!

We arrived in Michigan 11:30 on Thursday night, with half an hour to spare for ringing in the new year with my mother and brother. Following that came the late Christmas gift opening, fondue lunch AND New Year's posole, all on the same day. Yesterday was the ceremonial trip to the favorite childhood bookstore for lunch, where I always mean to branch out and get something different, but wind up with the roasted artichoke sandwich because it's just so darn good and I get it at most twice a year.

This morning, I woke up at an inhumane, achingly cold hour to deliver my brother to the train station. I am not used to 5 degrees fahrenheit any more, not that that's actually a temperature I saw too often even in my Michigan childhood. In exchange for the lake dumping snow on us all winter, it tended to insulate us from the worst of the cold. Indiana and Illinois, on the other hand, were on average 5-10 degrees warmer than Michigan most of the time, but had nothing to insulate them from the Arctic air that came howling down the prairie, so we experienced a lot more extremes in temperature, including several single degree days every winter (and what I really thought was unfair was in Illinois, even though there wasn't a body of water to provide humidity, it was humid all summer because corn gives off moisture. So it was skin crackingly dry all winter AND sauna humid all summer). This is all colder than Philadelphia, where it feels like an unreasonable cold snap when the daytime temperatures stay below freezing for a whole week. During one of those periods last winter, I was thinking that I had really lost my tolerance for the cold when it occurred to that maybe I should think about zipping up my coat. And putting on a hat, and gloves and maybe one of those new-fangled scarves, instead of attempting to reenact My Logger Lover. I hadn't lost my tolerance, I had just forgotten little details like the fact that we humans can use cleverly sewn together cloth to protect our skins from the cold.

Today was an interstitial day, before the next round of family comes in the form of B's parents coming down for a visit. We want to see them, of course, but I would be lying if I didn't say I cherish hopes of getting out to see a movie while they're here. After that, we head down through Illinois and Indiana for brief visits on our way home.

These visits are never long enough before we have to climb back in the car. Thank goodness our children are good travellers.