Still can't keep any food in me. Stayed home from work today. At least this bodes well for Saturday morning weigh-in haha.

In this hospital I work in, they moved the Department of Family Medicine across the city, due to lack of space.

So.

I'm sick, working in a hospital, but yet there is not a single doctor I can go to see.

Jason and I were sick all week. The kids were vastly improved. Today was my last day as tomorrow is an EDO. We pick up Stephen from daycare and he's got a fever. He's pretty much been crying non-stop since we got home, except for the nap. It's 10:45 and I just found Alex in her room in the dark putting on her summer sandles and playing on the floor. I'm so pissed that she won't just go to sleep. She's making my life a living hell in the mornings... will not get up, but she will not fall asleep at night.

I'm completely exhausted. I'm sick of hearing screaming. I hate that it seems we're starting another round of sick, and that my day off tomorrow is apparently going to be to parent a sick child, rather than get some much needed things done around the house.

And for those of you that pray, pray for my friend. She was 15 weeks pregnant and just found out the baby died. I believe this will be her fourth loss in 2-3 years.

And now I'm sick too :(

I'm sure it will be full-blown by the time I'm supposed to go back to work on Monday :/

...with a killer cold. Congestion so bad that even the decongestants aren't really helping.

Sucks that today is the day we celebrate Christmas with my family :(

Stupid kids not letting me sleep more than an hour at a time at night! Grrr!

I seem to have caught the stomach flu, for the second time in a one month period.

I feel disgusting.

Carry on.

Saturday morning I woke up feeling a bit queezy. I made it to my Weight Watchers meeting but had to leave early. I pretty much spent the rest of my day lying down on my bathroom floor wishing that whatever was attacking my insides would finish and come out.

It must have been a 24 hour bug, because I woke this morning feeling normal.

It really sucks that I just lost one entire day of my weekend though :(

I'm curious... when you have a sick kid, how do you treat your suffering two year old? I'm asking because, up until now, I've never really had to come up with a parenting strategy for when my kids are "sick", and up until this week, I didn't know I would need to come up with one either.

Here's my situation:

Alex, my 2.5 year old daughter, caught the virus-du-jour, which was actually pretty nasty. It starts off with a 3-5 day very high fever, accompanied with any or all of congestion, headache, sore throat, and upset stomach. Hers presented as a 4.5-day high fever and serious congestion.

I know when kids are sick, their ability to cope goes down the tube, so I've been pretty lenient with her. Partly because I feel sorry for her and I want her to feel better, and if she gets some solace out of watching Baby Einstein on repeat 5 times in a row cuddled up next to me on the couch, then why not, and part of it is because it keeps the whining at bay and it makes it easier for me to cope with having a sick 2-year old while caring for my newborn. Consequently, soo-soo (her soother) has been present during the day (it's normally only allowed at night); she's been allowed to eat whatever she wants whenever she wants (because she just wasn't eating, so if she ate anything at all I was happy); and basically she's been allowed to do things she's not normally allowed to do, because she's sick.

Well guess what, today she was feeling better... finally! And surprise surprise, when she was denied some of the previous "special treats" she'd been getting on a regular basis this last week, she had huge temper-tantrums and melt-downs. It's going to take me days to get her retrained, and until then, she's going to act like an awful spoiled brat.

So I'm wondering where did I go wrong exactly? (Rhetorical question for those of you about to list off the ways.) I've employed this technique before with no harmful reaction - no retraining required... but this illness lasted longer than most, and I think that's the problem. But either way, I'm wondering if I was way too lenient with her while she was sick.

So my question to you guys... what do you let your children do/get away with when they're sick? Everything? Nothing? And have you ever had behavioural challenges post-sickness?

Nothing like waking up to a kid with a temperature of 39, projectile vomit, and a news story of a practically local decapitation with human flesh consumption to really kick the weekend off.

Thank you for taking the time to see my daughter today about her relativly mild cough. Thank you also for prescribing some medication for her, as opposed to telling us to "wait and see if it gets worse", thereby making us come back when it's less convenient, more of an emergency, and take up more of our time.

What I'd like to talk to you about, is your amazingly fucktarded decision to prescribe my two year old, 80 ml of yucky medication as a one-time dose. While that may have been the right dose of medication, and while it's possible you may have also taken into account the vast amount that gets spit out, the reality of holding down a two-year old, injecting down her throat a 10 ml syringe full of medicine EIGHT FUCKING TIMES, while she is kicking, screaming and choking... lets just say that was probably one of the more stupid medical decisions I've come across. If you ever try to do something like that again, I'll ensure you have to administer the medicine yourself, just so you can fully appreciate the experience. In case you don't have an appreciation for how much liquid that is, it's more than half a bottle of gripe water.

It took a brief conversation with a hospital pharmacist for me to find out that you could have prescribed her a single tablet we could have crushed up and put in some jam. The drink we had to buy, cost us $30. The tablet that we ended up having to purchase anyways, cost us $12.

Drinkable crap = 2 hours of screaming and huge sticky mess everywhere + $30
Crushable pill = 0 screaming, happy toddler with a yummy snack, a sticky jam mouth's worth of clean up + $12.

Get. A. Fucking. Clue.

You'll have to pardon my lj absense lately. In conjuction with the construction in my basement, the car dying, and other family stuff, Alex has had a high fever the last few days. It finally broke this morning. I'm totally exhausted and praying that I won't get it.

I hope you are all well... point me in the direction of any posts it would be good for me to read... I doubt I'll catch up on all I've missed.

Yup, I've got some kind of illness, and it appears to have attacked my sinuses. This sucks, because I really can't take anything for it.

All day, my snot has been so viscous that I couldn't even blow my nose. I'm talking zero air exchange here. I got desperate enough to try hot sauce. After four containers of Taco Time's hot sauce and about an hour of blowing, I now have nasal air exchange.

I am so going to pay for this... both in terms of heartburn and in terms of even more frequent bathroom visits.

It's been crazy busy at work lately. With one girl gone on mat leave, my workload has increased by 25%. It's not unbearable, but it's pretty damn busy.

I came down with the flu on Thursday night, stayed home on Friday. The timing couldn't have been more unfortunate; I had way too many things to do on Friday to get sick.

Only good thing about it is that I was able to catch up on my sleep and relax a little bit. I'm actually wondering if the "flu" could have been stress/anxiety induced. This is the first time I've puked in about 10 years... but I'm sure I've been more stressed than this before.

Next week is looking just as stressful.

Alex is now independantly standing without using anything to help her up, and this week she managed to crawl up onto the couch without help. Nothing's safe anymore!

So by the end of last week, I'd mostly recovered from whatever it was that I had. I've still been sleeping obscene amounts though.

The Spring Symposium at work went really well. I think we had an excellent turn-out, and really good response from those who attended.

There's a few other odd things going on at work, but hopefully all will be resolved shortly.

Last week Alex cut another tooth, this would be tooth 11. In total she's got: 4 top front teeth, bottom front two teeth, all her 1 year molars, and she recently cut a bottom tooth that's just to the left of one of the bottom front teeth. She has a very toothful grin.

Last week she also finally figured out the whole climbing down the stairs and sliding off the bed thing. I'm relieved about the stairs. She fell down the small flight a few times, and now she's sitting down like 5 feet away from the stairs and then crawling backwards to them. It's so cute! The sliding off the bed thing really could have waited another 6 months or so in my opinion. I quite liked that I could put her on the bed and she was stuck there!

Anyway, this week promises to be busy, so I'm off.

I hope everyone is doing well.

Head hurts.

Exploding eyeball thingy right underneathe my eyebrow. And achey nose. I think the exploding eyeball thingy and nose-ache are related.

At least I can breathe now, but the headaches need to stop soon...

Two Friday's ago I went and got some antibiotics for this sinus/ear infection going on. I missed last Friday, Monday and Tuesday of work, and it's questionable whether or not I should have attended Wednesday. Thursday was my Dangerous Goods certification, and Friday was our big Spring Symposium where I presented.

My goal was not to snot/cough all over the podium. I drugged myself up good, and succeeded in my mission. Tylenol cold and flu kicks ass.

In other news, I've made progress on my daughter's baby album. I'm actually quite pleased about the progress.

What I really need to do is get my taxes done. That's this week's project.

So sick. No voice. Everyone's in town to visit. Alex's baptism is tomorrow.

My head is going to explode.

Alex had her first trip to the emergency room yesterday. She was eating some meatloaf then had some water and choked. Later that night we heard her wheezing, so we took her in.

They couldn't hear anything when they listened to her lungs, but later heard the wheeze. They were reluctant to give her an X-ray due to not wanting to risk the radiation. They suspected that she had just learned how to make a new and interesting noice *insert eyeroll*.

They pretty much said that if it was meatloaf, it would get infected and she would spike a fever... that's when I should bring her in. Soooooo against my better judgement we went home, and now we're waiting to see if she gets sicker.

In other news going back to work was... not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I'll post more on that later.

Other than the choking episode, my weekend was good. How about yours?

Alex is recovering nicely, thanks to the modern miracle of antibiotics. I don't think she has puss in the back of her throat anymore... at least I can't see it.

Jason and I ended up catching the flu (I suspect in the clinic waiting room), and we've been miserable all week. It wasn't a bad flu, but enough to knock us on our ass.

This week Alex has started cruising. Not much, but just a little bit. I'd REALLY like her to remain crawling for a while yet.

My new boss called. That's another thing I haven't posted on... work situation.
In short, while I've been on mat leave: The office has moved. The director quit, my colleague was named acting director, her husband got a transfer and she left, of the two new people that I was involved in the hiring process the one is pregnant due in Mayish, and the other is going to be moving shortly after I return to work.

So basically: new office, new director, new staff. New job?

Anyway the new director called, and she sounded awesome. She said it won't be a problem for me to adjust my hours to the time of the babysitter, so I can either change my hours which were 8:30-4:30 to 8-4 or I can go 8:30-4 but only take half an hour for lunch. I'm thrilled she's being so accommodating. She also indicated that I could come back full time, but if it's too much for me all at once, then we could work something out. Kickass!

I'm still apprehensive about going back, but I don't think it's going to be the fear factory my mind had made it out to be.

Christmas afternoon, Alex spiked a fever of 39.1. We got it under control, but she was tired and just not herself. She did well though, considering all the hustle and bustle of Christmas. The fever broke at about 5am.

Boxing day she appeared to be fine, but by Dec. 27, she definitely had a virus. Poor little thing was so congested, I felt so sorry for her! She was just miserable.

She seemed to be getting better but then she took a turn for the worse on Dec. 30 - our anniversary. She had spiked another fever. Jason and I spent three hours in the clinic waiting room (ok, well really two hours in the waiting room, and one hour both waiting and being seen in the exam room). It appeared she had strep.

We canceled our anniversary plans, and we also canceled our New Year's Eve party. I can't imagine anyone would want to come with strep in the house. As it is, neither Jason nor I felt very good on NYE.

This week, despite her illness, Alex has perfected crawling so that it's her primary form of movement, she's learned to clap her hands, and she's started throwing a ball and playing catch.

She's stopped eating solids this week, and has gone to almost exclusively nursing. I can't say that I mind. Poor little munchkin.