Entering Day #4: The Fever That Would Not Go

 

I am doing my best to learn how to be a calm and stable, all knowing force when it comes to illness in my house but I confess that my nerves and confidence become a little racked when things don’t clear quickly. I have a hard time just sitting and waiting.

Camden started acting a bit whiny late morning on Saturday. She came with me on our drive to pick up raw milk from a farm not too far from our town. She mostly slept for the hour long drive there and back which was nice. We got home and she acted pretty normal while we unpacked all the milk. About an hour later, after we’d eaten lunch, she fell asleep on me in the office while I checked my email. I thought that was a little weird since she’d all ready napped in the car and she’d given up naps about 3-4 months ago. When she woke up from her nap she was a little beast. She was crying inconsolably and was pretty combative. We had dinner plans at a friends so I was worried she would not be awake enough to go. When I finally got her to calm down and was holding her I noticed she was really warm. I thought it might have been from all the crying but I decided to take her temperature anyway and it was 102.4. Drats. Dinner plans cancelled.

For the rest of the evening she was my velcro child. Every time I had to pee, she cried (and I’m pregnant, so that is often). Every time I filled my water glass, she cried. Every time I moved in a way that didn’t please her physical senses, she cried. And then she puked. I reassured myself this would be over in 24-48 hours.

Wrong. We are entering Day #4 of whiny, velcro-attached and sickly child. I feel blessed that we’ve been able to keep her hydrated with water and apple juice but up until today she had absolutely no interest in eating. Just fluids, which we’ve been pushing.

Her temperature fluctuates from 101-103 during the day and 102-104 at night. Neither of us have slept well. It is hard sleeping next to a portable heater. We’ve been watching late night movies to assist in sanity; Pride & Prejudice (twice) and A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Entertaining enough for me, boring enough that my sick princess will fall asleep (all though she’s been requesting to watch Pride & Prejudice again).

Today she woke up and I was hopeful. The first thing she asked for was to eat and she wanted a flour tortilla, which I obliged her to. She took 3 bites and told me she didn’t like it. It was worth a try. I took her temperature and it was only 100.5. I really thought we had it made. Until about 10am when it was back to 102. Later we tried a banana. Bad idea. She walks to me with half a piece of banana in her hand and a very familiar look on her face. I grab the puke bowl just in time. We did make some additional food progress later that night and she ate 2 small yogurts and I’ve managed to sneak some probiotics into her apple juice.

As each ticking hour passes so does my mommy poker face. The dread of worry starts to sink in and I forbid myself from googling what kind of complications could lurk behind a fever that lasts more than 4 days in a 3 year old. I try to pretend I am like my friend Lisa who could probably cure the diseases of the world with garlic and cold socks (ok, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration). But at least I’ve learned to forgo using tylenol and ibuprofen for fevers.

And then, as I’m typing this little blog entry I hear something that has become very familiar over the last few days. “Waaaaaaaahhhhhh.” I rush into the master bedroom. Camden is crying. “What’s the matter?” She is holding her throat. “It hurrrrttttsssss”. I calm myself and collect my thoughts. What would super Lisa do? Oh yes, she would make some honey tea. So I warm up a mug of water (I nuked it – EGAD, don’t kill me Lisa!) and dissolved two spoon fulls of raw honey in the radiated water. By the time I get back to the bedroom Camden is all ready asleep. I coax her awake and get her to drink half of the mug of honey tea, which she likes but is too tired to drink all of.

I lay her back down and am called into the room half a dozen more times for re-arranged pillows, a request to go to Shelby’s house, a request for cartoons and a gripe about how both of her arms don’t fit into one of her pajama sleeves. I try to be calm and patient. I try to tell myself I should lay in that bed with her but heaven help me, four days lying in bed when you are not sick yourself quickly loses its novelty.

Needless to say, my mommy nerves are a little rattled. My confidence has waned and her new development of a sore throat on top of the fever, vomiting and diarrhea has left me needing reassurance. Off to the doctor we go tomorrow…

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Confessions of a Crunchy Mom

OK. So, I do my best knowing the things that I know to make sound and healthy choices for my family. I try to look at the overall picture and gauge the impact that any one choice may have on my own family or the welfare of those around us. However, a slight glitch must exist in this well intentioned plan of mine.

Here are my confessions…

CONFESSION #1:

I adore with wholehearted and unabated compassion Cadbury Mini Eggs. The bag before me says it is Family Size, unfortunately I don’t think it is referring to me and my unborn child but alas I have consumed every morsel. I have forced myself to read the ingredient label and it is as followed:

INGREDIENTS: milk chocolate (sugar; milk; cocoa butter; chocolate; lactose; soy lecithin; PGPR, emulsifier; artificial and natural flavors); sugar; contains 2% or less of: cornstarch; gum acacia; artificial color (yellow 6 lake; blue 2 lake; yellow 5; blue 2; red 40); ethyl vanillin, artificial flavor.

Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, roughly translated it is a bag full of chemical crap. Logically I know this. However, there appears to be a communication gap between the intelligent side of my brain and the “I don’t give a crap, give it to me now” part of my brain. So I continue on popping one chemically laden mini-egg into my mouth one after another, all the while drowning out that obnoxious voice in my head that yells “hypocrite!”

CONFESSION #2:

Not a very distant second in line comes my love for Lucky Charms. A definite contraband item in my home. I hide the box behind my pots and pans and sneak out a bowl at night when my daughter is sleeping. I can’t decide when I am at the check-out if I feel worse because the checker thinks I’m letting my three-year-old eat this crap or if I would be more embarrassed for them to know that the entire box is just for me. Even more ironic? I eat my bowl of Lucky Charms bathed in raw milk. Luckily I made my husband promise me that he wouldn’t allow me to buy another box for fear that this baby will come out a rainbow of marshmellowy colors.

CONFESSION #3:

I prefer the taste of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese over homemade macaroni & cheese or even the organic Annie’s brand that I allow my daughter to eat. I think I would still prefer a grilled cheese sandwich made with white bread and a Kraft processed cheese slice rather than the 12 grain bread and the Tilamook or raw cheese that I make my family eat now.

CONFESSION #4:

Far too much TV gets played in this house. Way too much. My daughter (when two) counted more accurately to ten in Spanish than in English thanks to good ol’ Dora. I actually hate the TV and would be fine without having one and yet somehow, someway, I am persuaded on a daily basis by a tiny little girl that she must watch cartoons. I know I should say “no” but alas, it just doesn’t seem to happen.

So those are my confessions. I am not proud of them but hey, I’m not anywhere near saying “never again” either. I am working on deprogramming my taste-buds and deprogramming my daughter from a world full of animated Spanish speaking creatures but it is not an easy task. Am I the only one out there?

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The Natural Dye Alternative

I have to admit that being a mother to a child who is sensitive to food dye had its moments of disappointment. I grew up in a home where we were blessed to eat homemade dinners almost every night. That didn’t mean, however, that our home didn’t contain the staples of Top Ramen, Kraft Mac&Cheese, processed cheese slices and Cambell’s soup concentrate. My mom did a good job feeding us considering that I don’t think we ever questioned the quality of the ingredients in mainstream marketed food products. We used to take dye and add it to food for fun. Like blue pancakes or green mac&cheese. In fact, I used to do the same fun things for little kids I used to babysit not having any idea that dye mattered. It just never occured to me.

That changed with my daughter. We discovered artificial food dye just wasn’t going to be allowed in our home for the mental health and sanity of us all. It turns out we are not the only ones affected by this chemical sensitivity and even the Lancet came out with a November 2007 study (random, double-blind and placebo controlled) that links hyperactivity to artificial chemicals and preservatives. We have had to be more creative in the types of sweets and treats we allow our daughter to have. This past Halloween was interesting in that I found all dye-free candy to give to her to replace the Halloween candy she got from Church during our Trunk-or-Treat.

I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I discovered natural food coloring prior to Camden’s third birthday. She wanted pink and purple cupcakes and I was pondering on how to make them. Lo and behold, I came across India Tree’s natural food dye. I purchased my set on Amazon.com.

India Tree’s food dye is vegetable based and contains no corn syrup or synthetic dyes. The pitfalls are that you will be hard pressed to get any primary looking colors out of this dye. At the most magenta is about as close as you will get to “red”. It is also pretty pricey.

However, for people like me this is just a wonderful alternative. It was wonderful to make my little girl fun homemade cupcakes for her Birthday and to make traditional frosted sugar cookies for Christmas or to dye easter eggs for Easter. We are pretty devastated right now because we can’t find our India Tree dye, we lost it sometime over Christmas so we’ll keep looking for it. Wish us luck! Here are Camden’s Birthday Cupcakes.

India Tree also carries a variety of natural dyed decorating sugars. However, they are not the only company offering synthetic free alternatives. The following companies also offer natural dyes.

Nature’s Flavors – They also give directions on how to use their dyes for Easter Egg coloring.

Seelect – Colors are sold separately.

If you don’t have the money to purchase any of these products there are also helpful sites that offer foodsource alternatives for getting the color you need. Here is one site.

Also, we found sprinkles that are colored with natural dye as well and we love them! We’ve also used chocolate candy coated sunflower seeds (purchased at Trader Joe’s)t o use as sprinkles on ice-cream.

Let’s Do Sprinklez

Please let me know if you know of any other natural food dye brands and I will post them.

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The Ultimate Childcare Solution: Outsourcing

Report: Many U.S. Parents Outsourcing Child Care Overseas

I can’t get the stupid movie to embed directly into my site so you’ll have to follow the link. Thank you Brendan & Julianne for a good laugh.

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Growing, Changes & Blogaphobia

Well, it’s high time I post and announce that we are expecting baby number two! We are very excited and feel very blessed to be able to welcome another baby into our family. I am a little more than 14 weeks along now and am due near the end of August. We had an ultrasound done at 10 1/2 weeks (that’s where the pics are from) to assure myself that we weren’t having twins (I was convinced we were!) and of course, we are not. Mike and I have also decided not to find out the gender this time. I am really excited about this. We are also seeing an excellent midwife by the name of Sherry Dress. She just celebrated her 60th Birthday and has delivered over a thousand babies and her knowledge is astounding. We will be having a homebirth with this baby and preferably a waterbirth. I’m sure our families will have fun with that news. Camden is soaking up the limelight of being able to be a big sister. Up until yesterday she was very adamant that we were having a baby girl. Yesterday, she changed her mind and decided she was going to have a baby brother. She did accurately predict the gender of my good friend, Emeth’s, baby-to-be as a boy. So, we will see. I have felt the first fluttering’s of the baby moving and that is fun. I am excited for when the movement will pick up and become more constant. I experienced some nausea and food aversion during the first trimester (which I hadn’t experienced at all with Camden) but thankfully that has completely passed. Ironically enough I have only lost weight so far with this baby – no complaints here. I didn’t take any belly shots when I was pregnant with Camden (which I regret) so have started taking them with this pregnancy. Here is me at 14 weeks. Excuse the ugly shirt.

Mike and I have also decided to sell our home. Various factors in life are making finances more difficult if not impossible in being able to afford our home. We also want Mike to be able to go back to school and get his engineering degree so that he can become an Electrical Engineer. We are going to attempt to sell our house as a For Sale By Owner. We were given hope by my friend Shelby and her Mike when they successfully sold and will close on their house this month. With the wiggle room we have in equity a FSBO seems to be the only logical choice. If we go with an agent we will have to continue to pay off on a loan we don’t even have a house to and that would be no fun. Once we sell the house it looks like we will be doing the apartment living thing again for awhile. Not fun, but better than being financially stretched to your limits every month. We will stick around here until the baby is born and then it looks like we will be migrating yet again. We really need to find a way to stop being nomads. We keep promising each other we will not move again and yet we seem to be moving every 1-2 years. We have never lived in a place together for more than 2 years. It is getting to be really obnoxious. But that is life I guess. No one stays put anymore. Goodbye House. Goodbye Friends.

So this blog has taken quite the back seat for awhile. I like to call it Blogaphobia. It starts innocently enough; an illness, life is busy, etc but then it just becomes this dreaded thing. I fell so far behind with so many drafts of unpublished blog entries that the whole thing just seemed to be an unaccomplishable mound of trying to sort through old ideas and memories. So instead I will just side-step and start anew. So, here we go.

Other news in life:

-Camden is starting to eat like a normal person. Hooray! As much as I didn’t want to create standoffs about food it was getting to be too much. She was becoming picky because she could and because I’d let her and not because she didn’t care for the food. We adjusted to allowing her to choose breakfast and lunch (as long as we’re at home) and that dinner was a family meal and is what it is (I of course serve at least one thing I know she loves). So dinner is no longer an option of what we’re having or what you’d like. It is just what we’re having. She has to try it, she doesn’t have to eat it. If she doesn’t want it then she can have cold cereal and that’s the only option. When she gets big enough to make herself a sandwhich she’ll be welcome to do that. Those changes alone have pretty much solved the problem. That and less snacking. I just had these horrible visions of preparing 5 different meals when all of the kids were grown and having children that were just as picky as my husband. I’ve also applied the same rule to my picky husband. If he doesn’t like it he’s welcome to cereal. Since starting this meal swap group though, he has gotten much better about his pickiness. Mostly I’ve learned that asking for his opinion on what he’d like for dinner is absolutely hopeless. His answer is a typical “I don’t know” or a “I like pizza.” As much as I’d like to make husband pleasing meals 5 1/2 years have taught me that I’d be trying for a very long time or we’d be dining at Jack-in-the-Box, Taco Bell, McDonalds and Papa Murphy’s for the rest of our lives (which wouldn’t be very long at that rate). So now we just serve healthy meals and I have a take it or leave it house.

-Mike’s brother just got back from serving a two year mission in Russia. We are excited to see him and hear his tales.

-Mike is becoming a hippie. It is quite the transformation and darn near hilarious. He is beginning to deny it less and less. Just earlier this month he went off of his acid reflux medicine (all his idea) and tried to treat his reflux naturally with Aloe Vera Juice. Granted the quality of the juice couldn’t have been that good because it was from Wal-Mart so it didn’t completely work but he did notice his stomach hurt less from either not taking his meds or because of the juice so we are looking for a more affordable and higher quality aloe vera juice. He also got in trouble at work for refusing to do a number of invasive medical tests (including multiple full body x-rays) in order to work at a high security nuclear site. They like to do all of the tests so that they have a nice before/after evaluation to cover their butts should someone mysteriously come down with cancer after working at a nuclear site. He stood on his principles of not undergoing medical procedures unless medically necessary and he took a hit for it: 3 weeks unemployment. I guess the head honcho called him this week and told him that he needed to go out there. Mike’s conceded. He says you can only stand on principles for so long when you have to pay bills. I am just shocked that he even took the stand. Pretty proud of him actually. He likes to say he’s gone over to the “dark side.”

I think that sums up our life right about now.

Oh yes, and Camden is sick. She has a fever ranging from 102-103 and threw up last night. I hope this passes quickly. Her baby velcroness did allow for her and I to watch Pride and Prejudice at one in the morning last night so that is a bonus, I guess.

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