Is It Naptime Yet

On Saturday when we went to see the nurse practitioner, Lilah’s hives had cleared up a lot so it was the last shot we needed to give her.
Half the blood work was back and they were all negative for the viral infection. 🙂
So we’re still not sure what caused it. 🙁

Lilah’s looking normal and acting normal. She did decide on Sunday that she wanted to take a nap during primary though.
I think I’ll reschedule our pictures for next week because she’ll probably have some pink spots on her face still come Wednesday.

Today I’ve done dishes and cleaned the kitchen a little.
Now that the weather is going cold to warm to cold, like Vegas Falls often start out like, I’m needing to put away some summer clothes and take out some winter clothes.

Lilah is at an awkward stage where size 4 pants are a little big but size 3 pants are a little small.
Eden is wanting new clothes but she gets hand-me-downs, with a couple new things in the mix. They’re new to her. 🙂

Lots of laundry is in my future as I reorganize the clothes.

The girls room is also being taken over by a poopy diaper smell.
It stinks in there so I use a plug in air freshener, but Jon can’t stand it.
I want a new diaper pail and since Eden only poops once a day I think I might put poopy diapers in the outside trash when they happen.
I just can’t stand the poop smell.
Jon says to give the diaper pail a good scrubbing, but it’s been soaking up stinky diaper smell for over 4 years. I think it’s time to get rid of it.

Up note- Carolyn and Derek got a new computer so they’re going to give us their flat screen monitor. Now all I need to is to find a cheap, but sturdy, computer cabinet and maybe someday I will have a fireplace- instead of a desk in front of a fireplace. 🙂

The other problem being I’ll also have to find a good filing cabinet for cheap.

Maybe I should try garage sells.

… when you’ve woken up too early consistently and you take too long of naps when your child comes out from their nap and wakes you from yours and you think:

“5 am, it can’t be 5 am? Where’s Jon? Wait it’s daytime still. It’s 5 pm.”

The hives have gotten worse so I went and picked up the steroid the nurse prescribed. Lilah will also be sleeping with me tonight so I can monitor her breathing. She’s had no problems thus far, but since she was progressively getting worse as the day went on I don’t want to take any chances.
Her face is even more covered with hives and her legs are mostly red with white welt middles. It’s so sad.

With the first picture she was more, ‘Mom why are you taking pictures of my bumps and why must I hold the shirt up?’ it wasn’t until the evening came on that she started acting more like how that picture feels.
She’s my sad little girl.
So I think I’m gonna skip the birthday party we were invited to and the temple session with the RS sisters that I was thinking of going to instead of the birthday party because I was looking forward to that before the girls were invited to the party. I just need some me time and since I’m assisting Lilah’s class on Thursday, if I feel like I still can with all her skin problems, I wanted part of a day without craziness which interprets to time away from kids. Life is just crazy!
I may still go to the temple if the night goes smoothly, just because Judy is a very capable person, she does have 6 kids, and like I said, I need some me time to relax in this sea of craziness. Jon told me that this is probably what life will be like for the next few years and I say, why can’t I have it easy?
So we’ll see how the night goes. I’m praying Lilah doesn’t start wheezing, which is the reaction I had as a girl and would be cause for another expensive ER visit.

Nine days after starting Lilah on amoxicillin she is now having a reaction of hives. We had only one day left of the medicine, or two doses.

Damn allergic reaction.

Jon woke me up at 5:53 am to tell me Lilah had hives and I of course called my mom to see what I should do and he went to the Mayo Clinic family health book. She’s not wheezing and they’re just getting a worse, now looking better since I put some anti-itch cream on her, but no wheezing which would make it more of an emergency.

I’m just waiting for it to be 8 am so I can call the doctor and see if I need to take her in.
Poor baby, I hate hives.
………..

Well, I called at 8 am on the dot. The nurse said there was no way to tell what the rash is from unless they see it, though she thought it would probably be form the amoxicillin, so I brought her into see the nurse practitioner.
It was an allergic reaction and I’m to give her Benedryl. If it looks as though it’s not clearing up I have a steroid prescription to get filled that should help.
I feel like they are getting worse, but I’ll wait a little bit to see if they affect Lilah. She’s been pretty much her regular Lilah self, just spotted.

I have some pictures so you can feel some sympathy for my poor little girl.

She’s a dalmatian.

her back.

Lilah’s leg after lunch. The others were before lunch.

I think the hives started being more defined in their borders.

I had Judy watch Eden for me so she could have some fun while Lilah got taken care of and I picked Naia up from Julie’s work after the appointment, since it’s right by my doctor’s office and I wasn’t positive that Lilah didn’t have something contagious.
Before I picked Naia up we stopped at Smith’s to get the Benedryl and I got us a couple doughnuts as a treat. The baker there thought Lilah was cute and she felt bad that she had some sort of allergic reaction. We got a couple of free bite sized cookies, though she was just giving them out.
Lilah’s become shy around everyone, grandparents included. I think she may be doing it for attention. ‘If I act like a baby I’ll get more attention’, though Jon will say she’s just shy. There are times she acts shy and doesn’t speak and then there are times she acts shy and doesn’t speak, but she makes baby type motions or sounds. I don’t know what to do with her.

So my worry about my girls having the same allergy as me has manifested itself in Lilah. I guess time will tell if Eden has it also.

We were going to have family pictures taken today, but I forgot about Lilah’s gymnastics’s class that goes from 5:30-6:00 pm. So I rescheduled it for next Wednesday.

It’s not like we can do gymnastics or pictures tonight though. Even if she’s not contagious I don’t want the other parents worrying about her or the other kids shunning her, since it would be the first class and we know no one in it. I also don’t want to worry the teacher with a new student that has a full body rash.

I hope she gets better soon.

I had an eye doctor’s appointment today. Judy Lee watched my girls and I took Naia with me to the doctor. I figured one child that I can leave in a car seat would be much easier than 3 children with 2 that would move around at their own free will. I’m also responsible for Naia once Julie leaves her in my care, so I’d feel bad leaving her with another babysitter.

My eye prescription didn’t need to be changed and so this will make two consecutive years that my vision hasn’t changed.

I’m sad because I wanted new glasses.
We gorilla glued a nose piece that had fallen off about two weeks ago so I was hoping that I’d have a valid excuse and would need a new prescription since the gorilla glue is like super strong super glue and my glasses are bound to break in every other place besides my right nose piece now. I’ve never kept a prescription longer than a year, which means I’ve never had a pair of glasses for longer than 2 years because I think once we just had the lenses changed.
I am happy to have my eyes stabilized. I wear a -5.00 which is pretty blind, so had my eyes continued to change like they have in the past I’d probably be legally blind by 35. My doctor mentioned how at age 23-24 women’s eye sight stabilizes and that’s the age they suggest getting laser eye surgery. I would love to get laser eye surgery but it costs too much money to even consider when you have a house payment, a car payment and home improvements to pay for, not to mention other costs that “come” up. I’ll probably be forty or seventy by the time laser eye correction becomes a priority, or legally blind. Maybe they’ll have a magic pill I can take by then.

If you go here you can kinda experience how blind I am.
When I complete an eye exam I can’t even tell that the top letter is an “E”. All I see is a blur with no distinguishable shape.

On an up side whenever I have the Lee’s watch my kids they always tell me I need to bring them over more often because it takes them so long to warm up to the place. Judy had to take kids to school and so it wasn’t until about 20 minutes before I came to get the girls that they left the couch once the kids were dropped off. I guess that’s what I get for having shy children.

….especially the ones who stick rubber bands up their nose.

I got the medical statement showing us how much we owe the hospital.

I didn’t pay a co-payment that night because I didn’t know how much it would be. It was more than what I thought it would be anyways.

Anyone want to guess how much it’s costing us to have two doctors and some nurse type assistant see my child for 2 minutes and get a rubber band out of her nose? Don’t forget the obviously very expensive stickers that were given as a courtesy and intrigued my other daughter to want to go to the ER.

Anyone?

I will hint that it’s three months of our medical expenses for our budget. (We try to put away for sucky days like these even though I’m sure we haven’t been saving the money very well lately.)

Also we haven’t used any of our insurances deductible yet this year, so we have the full cost, minus whatever the insurance writes off. I am glad to have insurance because it would have been nearly $1,000 without it. I think I never want to go to the ER again. So if anything happens before 7:00pm I am definately hitting the quick care, and I might even go to the extra scary part of town for an open quick care next time, though I hope there isn’t a next time.

ER’s are expensive.

So we found out that Lilah did not have protein in her urine, under closer testing, and she did have a UTI. So my question is how reliable are these dipsticks if they were both wrong!? Or did the nurse testing my daughters urine somehow mix them up?
So I have some amoxicillin to give to Lilah starting tomorrow.
I am like deathly allergic to the penicillin family so whenever I have to give my girls a medicine in this family I worry. This is only the second time though. I think Lilah took penicillin for her ruptured ear drum and now we’ll see if she has any reaction to this.
I had penicillin without any reactions and then one day I had a reaction to it that showed my allergy, so I will probably never consider my girls out of the woods for this allergy. Instead of giving Lilah the medicine tonight I’m waiting until the morning so I can watch for any reaction.
I wonder if my nervousness for a potential allergy will ever go away. I’m seriously nervous about giving her the medicine because I remember how bad my hives were and the itchiness that affected even my eyes and I never want my girls to go through that. In a way I don’t want to give her the medicine, but I know it will do her good and that just because I have the allergy doesn’t mean she will.

Other news about Lilah is she appears to be not sucking her thumb as often or really at all, mostly. This morning she complained about it hurting and I mentioned it might be sore because she sucks it. ( Jon mentioned to me how he’s noticed that she hasn’t been sucking it as often so he doesn’t want to have any negative attention due to sucking the thumb. I was just telling her how it is.) Once Jon mentioned not seeing Lilah suck her thumb as much I realized that I’ve noticed that she doesn’t suck her thumb at nap time and she’s not sucking it as much when we’re watching something or in the car, or when she’s bored. Instead she’ll eat her fingers or her blanket or the stuffed animal she has, which I totally don’t approve of, but this is mostly at nap time, when I think she’s most susceptible to wanting to suck her thumb. I am wondering if it’s a conscious decision or unconscious, but probably a little of both.
I am a little relieved to see her not sucking her thumb as often but that’s only because she’s getting older, though I didn’t mind except when she didn’t want to hold my hand in public because she was sucking her thumb, which is about the only time she’s ever let it get in the way.
We’ve never given her any grief for sucking it because often if a child is teased or discouraged in a negative way from sucking their thumb they will either react two ways, not sucking it anymore or the more common reaction is continuing to suck the thumb due to psychological trauma. As a psych major I know that most thumb sucking past the age of five is due to psychological trauma or emotional trauma, not always but often.
Since neither of our parents, and most of our family members, don’t approve of thumb sucking by toddlers we often had to remind them not to tease Lilah or give her the impression it’s wrong. I’m sure as Eden gets older we’ll have the same small battle.

We let out girls suck their thumbs so they could self sooth and there wasn’t any searching for a pacifier in the night because they lost it while sleeping, though we did have to help them learn to use their thumbs and find them when they were very little.

Today I took Lilah to the doctor.
Ever since the wedding Lilah’s had symptoms that have made me think she has a urinary tract infection and then they went away and then she got a fever Monday night and has been using the bathroom a lot. So I bit the bullet and took her to see the doctor, well the nurse practitioner, to have things checked out.
According to the in office test she doesn’t have a UTI but she does have a lot of protein in her urine, which is bad if it turns out to be something because that means something is going on with her kidneys.
It might have been a fluke. But they’re going to have some test run to make sure she doesn’t have a UTI and to see if the protein is a sign of something worse. I should know the results by Friday but I may have to bring in a sample from the first urination Lilah does Friday morning, guess where it’ll have to be stored, and then bring it in. If the protein is still high they’ll do blood test.
The nurse didn’t seem too worried, but at the same time right now there is no reason to really worry, though I kinda do anyways.

The reasons why I brought Lilah in are the following: one, she either really does have something wrong with her and I want to know, in which I feel like something is going on, or two she’s fine and I don’t have to feel guilty when I don’t want to take her to the bathroom 2 minutes have she’s gone just to have her sit there and do nothing. It’s not a problem at home because she’s on her own but when we’re out it’s kinda annoying. I missed different speeches at the wedding because it started right then that night.
I’m mostly worried that something is wrong and what it could be. She did say that it’s possible to have protein in the urine if the child’s been playing and what not, but she also said it was bad to have protein in the urine because of what it might mean.

I almost didn’t blog about this because it may be nothing, but it’s what’s on my mind today.

(I did some research and it looks like their is a benign kind of proteinuria, in which this information brings a little bit of ease to my day to know their can be a reason for protein in the urine without it being serious. )

After the doctor’s appointment I dropped off tupperware to Carolyn and then went to Kristi’s house to let Lilah and Kaitlynn play, only to have my mom take Katy after we’d been there an hour to get her hair cut. Though Lilah’s fever had begun again and she just wanted to be cuddled on the couch in a blanket.

The excitement of the day was this though:
I went to get Eden and she’d climbed onto the changing table and was taking the wipes out, something she loves to do.
Kristi was putting Adrianne down for a nap so I just took Eden and got a bag to put the wipes in. I hear Kristi say she stepped into something wet and then she picked it up to discover it was poop! So gross! but I just laughed and kept laughing to myself. She asked if Eden was poopy and she didn’t look poopy from the top of the diaper near her waist, but then at the leg you could tell she was poopy and a little had leaked out. So I kept laughing because Kristi stepped in Eden’s poop! Oh so gross.

Today was Andrea’s baby shower. Not many people RSVPed and there was another girl from UNLV who had a shower today also, plus it was a holiday weekend. So we had about 5 guest to start out, then us 4 Harvey girls and my mom, then after I did games and Andrea began opening presents 1 guest came with her daughter and grand baby and then 2 more also showed up.
So it was small and got off to a slow start but I think they had fun. I hope anyways.

We played a game where I had 20 questions about Andrea and her pregnancy, we measured the belly and then we did a price is right game. Instead of doing the memory game we had the products and they had to match them to one of the prices listed. Most of what I bought I got on clearance, so in total I paid about 65-70% of what all the prices came to. People were surprised to actually look at the normal retail prices of things, it was kinda funny.
I didn’t do the pin game, though I think it might have added a little fire to the group had Julie been on the look out for those who had their legs crossed or said baby, depending on the twist we gave it.

I think it went well overall and once the presents were done with there was a lot of conversing.

I was a little sad that it was a small turn out. I tried to get good gifts for the games, also things that were on clearance but nice, and have fun food, we had chocolate fondue. We also had chocolate covered popcorn for the guests to take home. I guess all that matters is that Andrea had a good time and that those who were there did too.
Since we had it on the other side of town, Carolyn’s new house is at Mountain’s Edge near Blue Diamond and Rainbow, I think some people may have been deterred to come. Part of me feels bad if that was a reason, but the valley is so big now that no where is going to be convenient for all and so I guess if you wanted to be there you were.
I think once everyone was there, a total of 14 adults, 3 toddlers and 2 babies, it was just the right size for Carolyn’s house.
I had Jon come with me so he could keep an eye on the girls and so those who know the girls, but don’t see them, could see them. Such as Veronica from UNLV, who brought her granddaughter so Andrea could meet her, and Deniece, whom Andrea use to work with and knows me too. I also think they’re cute and like to show them off.:) So kids were not not aloud but we did want to keep it to where they would be supervised by their parent since Carolyn and Derek’s home isn’t exactly child friendly.

Over all I think it went well. We actually had one person show up after all the guest had left, but that’s when she was able to come.
I’m happy Carolyn let us use her house, and I had fun going over there the night before and putting together furniture and rearranging furniture so it would be ready for Saturday. I tried to put the couch chair back to where it was but I’m sure Derek will have to fix it.

Eden feel asleep on the way home, in which she had to sleep on our bed because her bed is covered in toys from before we left.
Lilah feel asleep and then Jon and I feel asleep on the couch. We woke up about 7 and got dinner, which was cereal, around 7:30.
I actually haven’t eaten yet.

I now need to go over my lesson a little for church and write a talk for Lilah.
Even though we killed Derek’s printer my sister Kristi has an extra one that they’re willing to give us. Hopefully we don’t somehow kill this one too! (knock on wood), but it is a really nice one and fairly new.

My girls don’t have a lot of toys. But they’ve slowly been disappearing and some of their books have too.
Why, you ask.
Well they haven’t been cleaning up after they decide to pile as many toys and books as they can get past me onto Eden’s bed.
Then after they have piled so many toys or books we make them clean them up and sometimes they don’t want too. I know shock little kids not wanting to pick up after themselves. The problem comes because 8 time out of 10 Eden has to be put into timeout just so she will begin cleaning up. Then once you mention clean up Lilah decides she’s tired, her arms are tired, her legs are tired, some thing is always tired. So we fight with them and hover over them to clean up the mess they’ve made. We’ve just started setting the timer and then taking away whatever they don’t put away.

It started about a week ago when Lilah did this to our couch.

Literally every child book we had was on the couch and nearly every toy. Jon had let her do this because when we try to limit what they take they complain, so he wanted Lilah to understand the consequences of piling everything together. Jon gave her a half hour to clean it up but mostly she just whined. We got a box and put all the toys and books that didn’t get put away in it and and put it in our closet. The box is big, something I got from Costco and is bigger than a laundry basket.

Today it was toys on Eden’s bed. They hadn’t heeded to Jon’s first attempts to ask them to clean up so Jon set the timer. Lilah had to go to the bathroom and you could hear her saying loudly how she didn’t care for the toys and didn’t want her stuff animals. Then when I went in there to wash hands it was all about how much she loved them and wanted to take care of them.
Eden did a lot of the cleaning up, so thanks to little sister Lilah has more toys and books to look at.
After the 15 minutes was up we put the few things left into another box to go into our closet.
I was going to give the big box of toys back this week, after a week of being taken away, but one, the girls have seemed to forget about them and two, they make big enough messes without those toys.
I’ll probably sort the toys out later this week, maybe Sunday after I have the baby shower and my lesson taught. I hope to organize them and clean off some toys that could use a good washing or disinfectant and then purge ones that either annoy me or find little use.
My kids don’t even have that many toys, but it sure feels like a lot when it takes 20 minutes to just clean up one little bed and lots of whining