Sorry for the serious delay in posting. I’m just not feeling the blogging thing this week, but I’m going to power through it. So, here is the post I promised!
The weekend before last Eleanor started feeling a little sick. On Sunday she woke up with a terrible barky cough. You know, like a seal. She did not sound good. She was also wheezing a little. So we took her to urgent care that afternoon. I suspected Croup, mostly because I remember it from Anne of Green Gables (remember when Diana’s little sister is sick with the croup and Anne has to go help her and Diana’s parents are so thankful they let Diana be friends with Anne again, Amy, you know what I’m talking about) and I recognized the cough from the movie version of the book. It turns out I was absolutely right. But the doctor didn’t really believe me when I said that she was also wheezing in addition to her coughing because I guess it doesn’t usually happen with Croup, but when she listened to Eleanor’s lungs she could hear it too. I know my wheezing from living with asthma stricken brothers (and not to mention Josh). So, Eleanor may or may not have asthma, this wheezing may have been only croup related, we’ll see.
To treat the croup they gave her an oral liquid one-dose medicine and sent her home with an inhaler for the wheezing. The next morning the coughing seemed a little better but she was pretty lethargic. We ran over to target in the morning to buy her a humidifier so I could run it in her room before her nap. When we got home from target I put the poor girl on the couch and put in a Blue’s Clues DVD. I, meanwhile, cleaned up the kitchen and started cooking us some lunch. I didn’t really hear a peep from her, but assumed that she was just watching the show.
I put lunch on the table and came to get her from the couch only to find that she had fallen asleep. She hadn’t eaten much breakfast and hadn’t wanted a morning snack. And I didn’t want her to wake up early from her nap because she was hungry. So, I decided to wake her up to get her to eat before she took a nap. Big mistake! The poor girl cried and cried and asked to go back to the couch. So I brought her back to the couch, and she fell immediately back to sleep. I put a blanket on her, closed the blinds, turned off the tv, put all the lights out and sat in the dark eating my lunch. After lunch, I continued to sit in the dark with my laptop getting some work done while she slept for the next 3 hours.
When she woke up she felt hot to the touch. As I mentioned on Fabulous Friday, I discovered that our thermometer didn’t work. So after we picked up Josh from his bus stop we stopped at Target to buy a new one (I realize that we haven’t posted about Josh’s car theft, I’ll try to get Josh to write that soon). We took her temperature when we got home it was 103! Yikes! According to our What to Expect book a fever isn’t really dangerous unless its over 104. So, we tried to keep her cool and hydrated.
The next day was similar to the one before. She spent most of the day on the couch falling asleep and waking up. I mostly sat in the dark working. She would wake up every once in a while and ask for water or milk or grapes. Or she would ask for a hug or to hold her, or she would whine “Mommy, Mommy” until I would come and stroke her hair until she fell back to sleep. Her temperature had gone down some and by the end of the day it was only 101. She was like this for most of the day, but started to get very cranky in the evening and we had a terrible time getting her to bed. The photos from last week’s Wordless Wednesday came from that evening.
Eventually, she went to sleep and the next morning she was almost back to normal. Her temperature was 99 and she was up and walking around the house and wanted to go to the playground. I suspect she was doing so well because Daddy was home from work for Veterans Day.
Since then she has been doing gradually better and is pretty much back to normal, but still has a little bit of a cough, which could in all likelihood just be another cold.
And that was our week of illness. The little one needed a lot of attention which was kind of rough, but also kind of nice. She’s in her toddler “I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” stage (or maybe that’s just her natural independence) so it was nice to have her want me to do things for her and just to hold her and comfort her. It’s one of those times when you really feel like a mom.
