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All Good

TIMEOUTS

And she’s back in full force – better than before, if that was possible. The last two days have been perfectly perfect, with hilarity found in the most random places – a roll of tape, the bath tub, and even timeout. As she’s regained her energy back, she has decided to test the limits. Which makes me both proud and frustrated.

She’s landed herself in timeout a few times for simple things, like not helping to put away a puzzle, to really big things, like hitting. When I tell her she has to “go sit by herself” her reactions vary from devastated to ho-hum-la-de-da. The highlight of this new phase, aside from the conversations that follow, is the singing that she belts out from the rocking chair. It comes at show-tune volume, even through the bedroom door. So far her specialties have been “Puff The Magic Dragon” and “Take Me home, Country Roads,” her latest two favorite song books.

I have to work very, very hard to gather myself before going into see her – because if she’s singing, she’s in a hilarious mood and I love a hilarious mood. She now grasps the concept of time-outs and so far it has been effective, we’ll see when it needs to happen in public sometime, which I’m hoping won’t be for a long, long time.

FAMILY LOVE

I meant to write about how amazing both my mom and Barry were last week, during The Week That We Shall Forget, and maybe I did? But both of them were rocks. Barry was calm,  steady and reassuring, as always. He also spent his days divided between home and work, a stress in its own right. My mom was all of those things as well, but in a flurry of activity – prepping food, wetting cloths, and jumping at a chance to hold Maggie. I felt kind of like a wet rag, full of emotion and on edge, just wanting it all to be over.

When it seemed that we’d finally turned the corner for the better, my mom came down again and Maggie finally was alert enough to appreciate her presence. This meant that I got to take a long, long shower and even go to the store. When I was showering, and even when I was at the store,  I kept thinking to myself how similar the feeling I was carrying was to having a newborn. That shower made me feel like a million bucks and being at the store made me feel like I’d flown around the world in the hour I’d been gone.

When the clouds cleared and our house started to feel like the same old house again, we started to get visitors. My grandparents arrived with jam and a bouquet of flowers from their garden, my grandmother claiming that she’d held my grandfather away as long as possible. They played hoops in the backyard and we all ate popsicles.

Greg came by as well and worked with Maggie on her sticker book and went over the ins and outs of playing catch. Maggie delighted in the attention and was zonked out after both visits – still recovering. Aside from having visitors, we also started to revisit toys that we’d forgotten about. Maggie worked on covering her rocking horse in tape and we dug out some old favorites, but it’s hard to beat some simple cuddle time with Papa….

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Sleeping Face

Maggie has a series of faces that she can run through to practice any of her emotions. The one that always gets me is her Sleeping Face because she scrunches her face and eyes up and pokes her lips out while making a tiny snoring sound. It is by far her best face. Sometimes I have to remind myself not to ask her to do Sleeping Face too often because when I need a laugh she can bust it out and I’m bustin’ a gut. 

Yesterday was a planned rest day – still recovering from last week’s events – and after a long nap and as much food as a teenage boy would eat, I felt like Maggie was ready to go in the afternoon. One of her favorite activities to do is work on puzzles together. We’ve got some that are a bit advanced for her, but if we help her she’s willing to work on them. It’s a nice activity. After we’d completed one of the puzzles, Maggie started to joke about my mom and Sparky coming to visit, checking out the window and cracking herself up when they weren’t there. 

I half-heartedly went along with her. But Maggie just keep getting more and more goofy, eventually claiming that she was Sydney. She then proceeded to climb into Syd’s dog disc and pull her face into Sleeping Face while cranking out HUGE snores. I about melted onto the floor laughing. She kept doing it, even while I went to track down my camera. I love Maggie’s sense of imagination coupled with sense of humor, I hope she never tries to hide either. 

And speaking of Sydney…my dad called this past weekend wondering how Sydney had done during The Week Of Sickness, he loves that little pup as much as we do. Of course Syd was the very best Therapy Dog anyone could ask for. She stayed closer than usual, which means that she was never, ever far from our side. I’m pretty sure that she could sense the tension a few times. There was one specific time when Maggie’s temp was not coming down and I called Barry in a panic –  not sure what to do, fearing another seizure.  Sydney, who often ignores us when we’re on the phone, was staring at me as if I were talking to her, tilting her head from side to side. I wished in that moment she was Dr. Syd, but felt comfort in the fact that she was not going to leave Maggie’s side for any reason. 

She’s a very, very good dog and we’ve been telling her that often. We’ve also been trying to get her back on her two-a-day walks, which she deserves after last week’s chaos. Maggie has a great Sleeping Face, and I’m certain that Syd does too, but check out these images of Sydney’s Game Face. So rough and tough. 

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Two Ends of It

Last Sunday we were returning home from an exciting weekend away with some of our friends and brief visits with both my and Barry’s parents. It was exciting because we were finally revealing the news that I’m pregnant and Maggie’s going to be a big sister! B2, as we’ve been calling the little bean in my belly, is due to join us at the end of January 2013.

We stopped by my grandparent’s house on the way home to share with them the news and everything went as planned. [Another post I’ll have to write down people’s reactions to Maggie’s dress. Such a fun way to share with people!] We ended up having dinner and dessert with them out in their patio and we all watched as Maggie bounced off the walls going from one activity to another.

But that night, or more specifically, early the next morning, Maggie woke up puking. We thought that perhaps she’d had some bad food and after we cleaned ourselves up – and the second pile of puke that arrived – we fell back asleep. But the next day didn’t bring any respite. In fact, it got worse. Puke and diarrhea coupled with a nasty fever. Barry went to work and Maggie and I hunkerd down on the couch, me taking her temp, giving her medicine, changing diapers, and hoping she’d keep some fluids in.

She didn’t.

That evening she had her second febrile seizure after not being able to keep any medicine in her system to maintain her temperature. Thankfully Barry was home for this and he was the calm in the center of the storm. I later told him that I did him a favor by NOT having a heart attack as he held Maggie and I cried and cried trying to talk soothing words to our baby.

Almost immediately after her siezure, which lasted the longest minute or two in my life, we drove to an urgent care facility near our house. After being there for about an hour and discovering Maggie had a temperature of 103, they sent us to the ER in Everett, a scary 30 minute car ride away.

The doctors in the ER gave Maggie some anti-nausea meds and some tylenol (not oral) to maintain her fever. Within an hour she was running around the room and hopping between us as we made sure she sipped down the juice that they’d given us. We headed home without a diagnosis since Mags had a ‘normal’ exam and this left us with the false hope that perhaps this was just a blip on the radar.

The next day was much worse than the previous days – tons of puke and diarrhea coupled with a fever that just would not break, even with tylenol that was given non-orally. It seemed like that’s how the next few days went. My mom came down and we worked hard to get Maggie to take sips of coconut water, gatorade and anything liquid. We celebrated two sips. We acted like popsicles were the best thing in the world. Maggie could have cared less, she felt like total shit. It was awful.

By Wednesday night things hadn’t changed and I reached my limit – I could handle puke and diarrhea until the cows some home. I can even celebrate tiny sips of coconut water for a dehydrated baby, but I knew that I could not handle seeing another febrile seizure. The only way for Maggie not to have another one was to get her fever under control and it appeared that the fever was only going to go down she could take Ibuprofen orally.

After some more puke and a high temperature, we went to Seatttle Children’s Hospital. I never, ever want to go there again, but the service and the facility was amazing. We were there for roughly 3.5 hours and by the time we left, we again had no real diagnosis as to why Maggie had a fever, severe puke and diarrhea. I can’t bring myself to go into details about some of the tests they ran, but there were tears shed and I’m sure it was horrifying for Maggie at times.

Although they didn’t send us home with a diagnosis, they did send us home with some of that glorious anti-nausea meds that Maggie was given in the ER on Monday night. The anti-nausea medicine was fantastic in that it allowed her tummy to be tricked into keeping liquids and medicine down and not puking it up right away.

And eventually that dang fever subsided.

And eventually she kept liquids down.

And eventually they came back up again.

And so on and so forth.

Little by little, our girl with a firecracker of a personality has been creeping and fighting her way back to her sassy self. I’ve felt myself getting back in to the routine of simple reminders and she’s back to attempting to bargain her way out of things she doesn’t like to do.

Today, a week after we were galavanting our way down the I-5 corridor spreading the good news about our growing family, I feel like we care so much more. We care about the littlest things – fresh water, regular poops, actual tears, playing a card game for the millionth time – and some pretty big things too – immune systems, medicine, sleep cycles, our families, and our ability to help nurse our baby back to health.

As I type this Maggie is blowing bubbles off our back stoop. Some how she has decided that after each bubble blow, she needs to clean off the wand. I think that might have something to do with the fact that she dipped the wand into the dirt while we weren’t looking…..