Thunder Up

I know The Hater and I have been too consumed with baby to talk about OKC's NBA basketball team and how much they rock. It's really a shame because they are playing very well this season; we've been pleased with them.

If you'd told us at the beginning of the season that we'd be playing game 6 of the playoffs we'd have likely thanked you for your optimism, but thought that you were a crazy person.

I've warmed up to the name "Thunder", but still despise the logo. The Hater likes Rumble, the mascot, but is weirded out by his bangs. Regardless of our trivial hang-ups, we're pumped for tonight and hoping for the best.

allergic to April

This is the time of year when Sister becomes the epitome of pitiful. Her eyes swell out of her head, the skin around her eyes chaps from the tears, and she becomes a skinny allergy machine. She's learned that she just simply can't touch her face if she's been outside. She has to shower when she gets up in the morning, then again when she gets in to wash off the pollen. She takes the path past the least amount of flowers when she walks out to her car in the mornings. She just says, "I'm allergic to April."

The Hater and I have seasonal allergies, too, but we'll be the first to admit they're not anywhere as close to as bad as Sister's are. I take loratidine year round and add an extra prescription allergy medicine for March until things die off again. The Hater takes three allergy medicines this time of year, too.

We assumed that Baby would inherit some sort of seasonal allergies, too, but we were hoping she wouldn't grow into them until many years from now.

If you remember, Baby has been on antihistamines for several weeks now because of the welts. She's been on Singulair plus Zyrtec, which has made her a little cranky, but relatively fine with it all. We've been none the wiser, too.

Well, last night Mom of the Year forgot to give her the Zyrtec. I remembered about it after she'd already gone to bed, but The Hater and I decided we shouldn't wake her up to give it to her. She woke up later in the night and we decided not to give it to her... Well, this morning she woke up in a fairly good mood. As I was changing her she scrunched her face and looked at me funny before sneezing out a huge wad of snot. That was the beginning of several sneezes followed by several Tablespoons of snot followed by little hands rubbing it all over her face. I gave her the Zyrtec before I took her to day care this morning with apologies, of course.

I really figured she'd be better within a couple of hours, and that's exactly what I told the day care lady when I handed Snotty to her this morning.

This afternoon I picked up Snotty. Her upper lip and cheeks were chapped from the ever-flowing nasal fountain paired with the extra saliva of teeth-cutting (because it'd be too easy if we only had one mountain to climb at a time).

Next week we're going to have to take her off of everything in anticipation of her appointment with the pediatric allergist. I totally dread the experience ahead for her. I can't imagine facing this time of year without the precious antihistamines.

I remember telling the pediatrician last year at her three month appointment that I thought she had the same seasonal allergies that The Hater and I had. He told me that allergies develop after continued exposure and the probability of her having actual "allergies" were slim to none because she hadn't really been around long enough to be overly exposed to things. I questioned this, but, hey, he was the doctor with all that fancy schoolin'.

Baby took her antihistamine about 13 hours late and paid the price of her inherited allergy to April. If they tell me again this year that she doesn't have seasonal allergies I'm going to tell them they're crazy, and I may just say it as plain as that. I've since added "seasonal allergies" to her list of complaints for the specialist.

You will hear every tenacious detail of 1/3 of our home being off of antihistamines soon. I can only imagine what she'll be thinking... My Precious! O my Precious! We wants it, we needs it. Must have the Precious. They stole it from us. Wicked, tricksy, false! Give us the Precious!

dust bunnies

Many things in our life have changed in the last 13 months. Some things, like being able to sleep late, vanished immediately. Some things, like making sure goodies are put away at our hip level, will turn into things being put totally out of sight when she gets older.

Now that we have a toddler, the ability to slack on vacuuming is a new change we cannot ignore. Dust bunnies, pieces of dead grass, forgotten thrown bites of goodies hidden under the high chair - any little piece of anything that can be picked up and eaten will be eaten. Our days of being lax on the floors are behind us. In order to cut down on unplanned non-nutritious snacking, we're going to have to increase the frequency of our floor cleaning.

Vacuuming now is not an easy task. I carry baby in a sling and vacuum while The Hater goes around in front of us and moves furniture out of the way and around so that I can get under and around it. The process takes us about 30 minutes, but it's a really really really long half hour. Baby likes it - the whole thing totally zones her out. However, she's about outgrown the sling, so I'm not entirely sure how much longer we'll be able to make this game plan work.

I've tried the dust mop to pick up between the vacuum-adventures. It's okay in a pinch, and it's certainly better than just letting baby feast on the dregs... but it's not very effective. Because of this we've become the family who makes a concerted effort to steer baby away from the bigger dust bunnies towards the end of the week, the family who believes that a little cat hair never hurt anybody. (Actually, we tell her it's roughage.)

broken hearted bye-bye

This is the second consecutive night that I've had to go back to work in the evening. Usually this only happens a few times a month, but this month it so happened that the nights were consecutive. I'm really tired today, and moreso anticipatorily tired for tomorrow because I have to be at work crazy early for an important committee meeting.

The Hater came in tonight while baby and I were eating supper. After everybody finished eating and cleaning up I really didn't have long before I had to leave to go back to work. Baby was playing with her toys. I said goodbye to her and she ignored me. I kissed The Hater and she continued to ignore me.

As I walked to the kitchen to get my purse I think she figured out what was going on. She started yelling "bye bye! bye bye! bye bye!!" really excited and walked in third gear over to me. I picked her up and she immediately looked at The Hater and waved and said "bye bye" to him. She thought she was going, too.

I kissed her on the cheek and told her that Mommy was going bye-bye and she was going to stay home to play with Daddy. I handed her to Daddy, grabbed my purse, and walked out of the house to her screaming her head off.

Sometimes it's really hard to be 12 months old. Sometimes it's hard to be 384 months old, too.

mystery solved

Tonight as I was getting baby ready for bed The Hater came into the nursery announcing that he had something funny to tell me. Indeed, he solved the case of the missing sippy cup. But in all fairness to us, it really blended in with her toys. (And here's a picture to prove it.)

I'm proud to add that we found it before the ants did.

the case of the missing sippy cup

This afternoon we lathered up in sunscreen and went down the road to the swing-set playground. Baby swang and swang until she couldn't stand swinging anymore. It was much fun, and then we came back to the house. I handed baby a half-full sippy of diluted pear juice and started on supper. The Hater played with her while I got supper together. We ate supper without much fanfare or excitement, although baby went goo-goo-ga-ga over some baked veggie nuggets and steamed carrots.

After supper The Hater and I started cleaning up when we began looking around for baby's sippy cup. Long story short - we have torn the house apart and looked in every nook and under every cranny. Alas, no sippy cup.

We have no idea where the ant magnet could be hiding, but we hope that baby stumbles across it tomorrow... or at least really, really soon.

tunage plea

I'm working on a project. This should come as no surprise to those of you who know me because I like projects. You may also know that I have no problem at all asking for help with my projects!

This particular project is going through all of my pictures of baby's first year. I'm taking my favorites and putting them into a movie for the grandparents. (It's actually for anybody who would like to see it, but we figure the grandparents will be the only people who can stand to look at a picture slide show for an hour and twenty minutes...)

I've gone through the pictures several times and deleted and deleted and deleted shots. But I'm done editing shots; I don't want to delete any more. (Remember, neither Stephen King nor I excel at brevity.) The next stage of this process is a soundtrack to play behind the pictures.

The soundtrack is as important as the video. I want songs that reflect baby, which is hard for three reasons: One, because not many people have written songs about sweet baby girls, so we're having to be creative in thinking of sweet songs or songs about girls that will be appropriate (Thus Jay-Z's "99 Problems" was nixed for this particular project.). Two, because baby has only been on this earth for a hair over a year; let's be honest, she's not done a whole lot. Three, because nobody wants to listen to an hour and a half of children's songs. (Trust me on this one!) So I'm trying to intertwine "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Jesus Loves Me" with Eva Cassidy ("What a Wonderful World") , Tom Petty ("Wildflowers") and Jimmy Buffett ("Brown Eyed Girl").

I've not started actually matching up the video to music yet because I want to get a list of songs that I want to use first. This is my first big project with iMovie on the Mac, and I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to actually scoot the songs around once I put them in place. (It's not at all easy to move pictures around once I've moved them to the project, so I assume it'll be equally not as easy for the music portion... although I could be wrong.) This is why I want my list together before I delve into it.

This is the part where I confess that my mental musical database falls terribly short and I beg you to help me come up with song ideas. Maybe as you're reading this you're thinking you know exactly the right song I should use. PLEASE put any song suggestions in the comments section. I really don't want to have to defer to "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" or "There's a Hole in my Bucket" to fill the space...

Please help. Put your song suggestions in the comment section. Thank you!

Kingdom Hospital series

The Hater and I are watching Stephen King's KH series through Netflix. Mostly I'm watching it and he's playing on the computer, but it's on and we're getting through it. The Hater keeps telling me I don't have to watch it, reminds me that it was rated really low.

But I have high standards for SK. I've read so much of his stuff that I know eventually this nose-diver will pull up and recover. I know that SK's weakness is going on and on for seven pages something that he could've described in a moderately-long paragraph. I know his thing isn't editing. But I still like his stuff.

I'd like to go on the record with this one that it's even hard for me to swallow, and that's saying a lot.

svelte welt, Part Three

This picture was taken this weekend after baby had the Singulair and Zyrtec both in her system. We'd also put benadryl cream on this spot, too, but it didn't seem to make any more difference. And then we got to thinking -- this particular spot is most likely a reaction to where she got her birthday shots. It seems like she got them high on her thigh about were that spot is.

I think the Zyrtec gives her medicine head a little bit. She seems more tired and irritable to me during the day. I said something about that at day care today and they agreed. Hopefully she won't have to be on it for long.

This morning I received a phone call from the clinic scheduler that baby has been scheduled to see the pediatric allergist at the Children's Hospital at their first available appointment, on May 6th. The phone directions weren't clear about how long she was to be off of her antihistamines before the appointment, so I plan on calling their office tomorrow to clarify.

In the meantime, baby is on soy milk and is pretty good about drinking it. She has no ugly red areas like she did last week. She's cutting two new bottom teeth (and not sleeping so well with that). She points at everything and says, "Ooh!". She likes to read stories and play with her blocks and cups. She keeps The Hater and I on our toes while she's awake.

We're hopeful that this antihistamine combo will hold us over until we see the specialist. I'll update more to the welts specifically when we know more to tell. I hope to get the results back from the lab work results in a couple of weeks, hopefully before she sees the specialist.

We're a household full of hope... and antihistamines for spring allergies and mystery allergies...

welter skelter, Part Two

Thursday after lunch I received another call from day care that the red spots were back. I'd sent the benadryl with her, so they gave it to her and I called the doctor. He didn't call back until the end of the day. By that time day care and The Hater and I questioned if these were a delayed reaction to her 1 year shots that she received last week OR some sort of delayed reaction to milk. (On her birthday last week we swapped her over from cow-milk based formula to the real mccoy - red top whole milk.) He thought like we did, it was really unlikely that it was the milk. He told me to bring her to the office if it happened again on Friday, but not to swap her over to soy milk just yet.

And, oh, did it happen again. About 7:30am today day care called to report the welts were back immediately after her morning milk. The office didn't open until 8:30. At 8:15 I left work and picked her up. He worked us right in... and as you can see in the pictures, these were really impressive. (I did one up close so you could see exactly how they all looked.) They had progressed to warm, red, raised welts with blister-like areas. They were located on both thighs, both calves, both upper arms, and across her bottom. She was in no distress, but we were agreed that this was something that warranted more than benadryl. He took pictures and referred her to a pediatric allergist. He started her on Singulair for babies and drew an allergy panel. She is banned from cow-based dairy products until further notice. (The story of holding down my screaming 12 month old while they draw blood is another post altogether. Trauma.)

I brought her home & took these pictures before giving her benadryl & applying benadryl cream to them. We went to the hospital to pick up the Singulair, to Target for vanilla soy milk, then back to day care. By the time we got back to day care the blister-looking areas were gone & the reddened areas were more light pink than red.

This afternoon there are two tiny pink dots on one leg. She likes the soy milk. And she's in a pretty good mood, all things considered.

Hopefully the allergy panel will give us some insight as to what's going on with her. Hopefully the allergist can let us know if this is a delayed reaction to her 1 year shots (somehow triggered by the milk?) or if it's to the milk itself. (The doctor and I both find that really hard to believe since she's been on the cow-based formula since she was about 4 months old, but who knows.) Hopefully we'll get all of this under control before the welts progress further to a more alarming reaction.

The doctor called again. She'll also be taking zyrtec every day with the Singulair until we see the allergist and are told otherwise. We will continue to use the benadryl cream on each of the spots that happen to come up.

By the time I was putting her down for the night the two red dots had progressed to two nickel-sized places, one on top of each thigh, and she had a half-dollar (plus) sized blistery-looking welt on EACH ankle.

I'm very thankful that none of this seems to phase her at all. They look painful and itchy, but thankfully she's only bothered by us wanting her to sit still long enough to look at her.

I will sleep with one ear open to hear every breath she takes tonight through the monitor. Nurse Mom is on duty.