Eating Metal

This is actually a little gross.


Magnetic Putty Magic (Extended Cut) | Shanks FX | PBS Digital Studios from Joey Shanks on Vimeo.

Roadside Equipment

This morning Travis went to check on Mila while she was playing in the kids' room.  

"Oh.  You're playing with the cone and barrel.  Again."

Pause.

"You've got allllll these toys and you always play with those."

The cone and barrel he's referring to go to Aiden's matchbox cars.  It's a miniature road cone and barrel.  Mila loves them.  She chews on them, then puts the cone in the barrel.  Rinse, repeat.  What a simple life babies have.

Regressing

I don't know why, but Aiden has been wetting the bed every other night for the past week or two.  He has been potty-trained since September.  I am exhausted.  Whenever this happens, he freaks out, wakes me up, then we have to change his clothes and sheets.  To help cut back on my exhaustion, I broke down and bought disposable underwear for kids that wet the bed.  

I was nervous about trying this because I didn't want to hurt his morale by putting him in a "diaper" and I also didn't want him to get excited about wearing them and stop using the toilet in the middle of the night.  Last night was our first night to try this and he's leaning towards liking the disposable underwear.  I'm walking a fine line between telling him it's okay to wear these because he has accidents and calming his excitement by saying it's not okay because only babies wear diapers. 

The new rule is, no fluids after 7 pm.  Some nights that's difficult because we get home late and I would not expect him to eat dinner without a drink. We always make him go to the bathroom right before bed.  I know he wakes up sometimes to go in the middle of the night.  Maybe he's been sleeping heavier lately, so he doesn't wake up when he needs to go?

I was ecstatic he woke up with a dry underwear this morning.  If he can stay dry for several nights in a row, we will stop using them.  I'm hoping that happens quickly - no need for him to get used to this situation.  Crossing my fingers...

Sad Week in the News

It's been a rough week to watch the news.  I'm sure most of you have heard of these items, but sometimes I like to use this blog as a journal so I can go back and see what was going on in my life.

1. Boston Marathon Explosion - Two deadly explosions at the finish line killing three people and injuring 170 (including trauma severe enough that limbs have been amputated).
2. Ricin letters - A conspiracy theorist sent two letters filled with the toxin ricin to President Obama and the U.S. Senator of Mississippi.
3. Explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas - 15 people dead, almost 200 injured, town evacuated. And here is one reason why it scares me when people flock towards devastation (fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc).

Keeping Up

About that lock box I mentioned yesterday...

Travis and I gave in and hired a housekeeper.  For the time being we have her set to come every other week.  If we need to push it out to every three or four weeks we might do that later.  She came yesterday for the first time.  I spent Monday evening in Urgent Care, then last night was T-ball.  I was driving home from practice trying to remember what state our house was in when I remembered she had come earlier.  I had to be very careful with my gas foot because it suddenly got really heavy at the prospect of what was waiting for us.

That woman cleaned things I haven't thought about cleaning since before I had kids.  She dusted the top of our door trim!  She took everything off my nightstand and dusted that! (I usually dust around those items.)  She moved a side table away from the wall in the kitchen to sweep and mop!  She cleaned our microwave.  

Seriously.  This is a big deal.  I don't have time to do many things.  Other items get done once a month or sometimes even longer apart.  The only items I take care of every day or week are my kids, dishes and laundry.  Everything else happens when I have time.  I barely even have time to sit down for dinner.  The longest stretch of time I get to sit with my plate is five minutes.  The rest of the meal is spent feeding Mila, getting Aiden seconds, cleaning up the food or drink someone spilled, etc.  But those five minutes are usually filled with guilt.  That's when I sit still long enough to notice the dust building up on my curtains, or the cobwebs that have formed in the corners.  I always wonder, when will I have time to clean that?  

I used to keep an immaculate home.  All my free time, when Travis was at work, was spent cleaning.  That free time is now filled with other more important items, so I feel comfortable saying I am happy to have a housekeeper.  She was super nice, though I will never see her.  She comes during the day while we are at work.  Hence the lock box.  We have a key lock box (like realtors use) to let her in while we're away.  This way she doesn't have our key all the time.

It's magical.  Absolutely magical.

Mila's Ear Infection

Wow.  So I forgot about blogging for a little while.  Sorry 'bout that!

The past two months have been a little stressful with Mila.  She's had an ear infection that just will not go away.  She had two different oral antibiotics, then we tried the shot and now she is on Augmentin.  They gave her a crazy high dose, so she has an upset stomach and lots of diarrhea.  Like five times a day.  We started the newest med this past Thursday, so the diarrhea didn't get going until Friday night.  Since I was around to keep an eye on her, I was able to change her diaper the moment I heard her blowin' it up.  By Saturday morning she'd developed a rash I'd never seen before - some in her diaper, some down her leg.  I called our pediatrician's nurse help line.  The nurse was unsure what to do, so he called the doctor, who in turn said to bring her in if it got worse.  At that point, we didn't know if it was diaper rash (why would it be down her leg?) or an allergic reaction.  Sunday afternoon it seemed to be getting better so we didn't bring her in.

Monday (yesterday) evening, Mila's teacher told me she had horrible diaper rash.  I looked at it as soon as we got out to the car and sure enough, it had gotten worse.  Raw, broken skin.  It looked bloody, but there was no blood in her diaper.  I ran through the McDonald's drive-thru for Aiden, dropped off the casserole I had brought down at my friend's mom's house (her husband died a couple weeks ago) and then headed to Pediatric Urgent Care.  

We walked in the door at 5:45.  I guess I've never been on a Monday evening, because that place was FULL.  Every chair was filled.  I guess I have seen it that way, but Aiden was over a year old, so I took him to the regular urgent care clinic next door.  I checked in Mila, Aiden made friends with one of the kids waiting (who was thankfully in for a bug bite, not a sickness) and we started our wait.  

You know in the movies, when there's a couple at a restaurant and some family is letting there child run around screaming, dragging their spoon on the back of everyone's chairs?  Well that kid was in the waiting room last night.  See here for more info.  He was around 2 years old, shoeless and wild.  His mom kept trying to hold him on her lap to keep control, but he would just flail and scream.  Then she'd give up for a bit and he'd crawl under all the chairs in the room, putting anything he could find in his mouth.  He made it to the end of the chairs and another lady in the waiting room said, "Uh.  He just put an orange peel in his mouth."  The mom grabbed him when he crawled back and proceeded to pull out the orange peel, 5 fruit snacks and a rock.  Thankfully he's was the first to get called in back.

Mila peed through her diaper onto my lap twice.  I don't know why the diapers decided to stop working.  Maybe they weren't on tight enough?  Both times, I had to take her out to the car because I hadn't brought in any diapers.  I don't carry a diaper bag with me during the week because we just go to daycare and back.  I keep a couple extra in the trunk of my car for situations like this.  But each time I had to go out, I was trying to hurry so I didn't miss getting called in back.  I was out in the sun on Sunday without sunscreen so my shoulders are burnt.  I was carrying my purse on my shoulder, plus Mila will not sit on my hip because it hurts her too much.  Instead she clings to my shoulders like a baby monkey.  Normally it wouldn't be so bad.  With fried shoulders it's a little uncomfortable.

I was next in line to be called in back and a family comes running in carrying a limp child who's eyes are rolling back in his head.  I'm not a doctor, but that seemed more like a trip to the ER or maybe even taking a ride in the ambulance.  Anyway, obviously that kid got to go ahead of us.  

FINALLY at 7:30 we got called back.  The nurse took Mila's vitals and the doctor walked in right away.  She took one look at her and prescribed two ointments.  She took a sample to run a culture to check for staph.  We are medicating for staph anyway, since the culture won't be ready to read until Wednesday.  So!  Over to Walgreen's.  

I checked in at 8 o'clock (Aiden's bedtime and an hour after Mila's) with the pharmacist.  She said one of the meds needed to be compounded and it would take 30 minutes.  I pulled the car around to a spot, gave Mila a blanket and Aiden my phone (thank goodness for YouTube) and waited again.  I pulled into the drive-up at 8:30 and they said it would be another moment.  Fifteen minutes later another car pulled up behind me and I decided to drive around so that car could be helped.  At 9 pm, they gave me the medications.  The pharmacy tech said, "Sorry you had to wait so long.  We don't mix up that ointment until the customer arrives because of cost reasons."

If that glass was not there I think I would have slapped that woman.  If I would have known that, then I would have sat at that window from the start.  I only pulled around so other people could get through.  I was too irritated (sunburnt, tired, hungry, two tired/cranky kids) to go sit inside.  I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was making up excuses for why it took so long.

Despite eating 5 of Aiden's leftover fries and 4 whole Jolly Ranchers, I was starving.  I just wanted to go home, gorge myself, and sleep.  What I really did was go home, get the kids ready for bed, medicate Mila (pure torture for her and me), eat a cup of couscous salad while watching some news coverage on the horrific Boston bombing, listen to Travis while he showed me how to use a lock box he bought that day (I'll try to remember to write about that later), clean up the house, THEN get ready for bed. 

My dad said parenting is perseverance.  True dat.

These doctor appointments for Mila are $30 a pop.  She has had 5 appointments for her ears and diaper rash.  Plus antibiotic costs.  It's been an expensive venture.  Thankfully Mila is our problem child since our income is a little healthier than it was when we had Aiden.  

Ugh, I'm cranky today.