childbearing hipster

I'm not a bad mom, I'm just a product of my own upbringing

The girls have been sick, then better, then kind of sicker, then kind of better, off and on for a while now. Finally after I got home from dinner last night to find Maggie asleep on Dug's lap on the couch, and after she kept us awake pretty much all night (a king-sized bed just isn't big enough for that child), I decided it was time to take some actual action with this sickness thing.

So, I looked up their symptoms on the Internet. And then I made a pediatrician appointment.

Now, I'm sure some of you are totally floored by my laissez-faire parenting. You'd have looked it up in books at the first sniffle, Googled it two days later, had your kids into the doctor before the first week of boogers was up.

And that's because you're not the child of my mother, nor of my inlaws.

See, before Grammy was a teacher, she was a nurse. And as with many nurses, especially old school nurses, she didn't have a heckuva lot of patience for sickness. Basically, you had to meet some pretty stringent criteria to actually "be sick" under the Grammy regime, and without a fever or vomiting or an actual bone poking out of your flesh, you were pretty much guaranteed to be going to school that day.*

And Dug's dad is a doctor. They don't even have NEOSPORIN at their house. Dug's parents would have sent him to school bleeding, with a hankie to press on the wound if it didn't clot fast enough.

So neither of us is really inclined to take illness seriously enough to seek a professional. Everything in our house is treated with rest and fluids, plus aspirin if you're over five feet tall and non-aspirin if you are under. This is the second time in the entire history of my life as a mother that I've taken one of my kids to the pediatrician for anything other than a well-child checkup.

But today the internet told me I should take them to the doctor, and I always believe the internet, so off we went. And of course, my self-diagnosis of sinus infections was correct, with the bonus prize of double ear infections for everyone! Huzzah! Just in time for the holiday weekend!

An hour spent wandering around the drugstore and a small fortune that produced a huge rant in my brain about the state of health care coverage in America that I will spare you, though I had every intention of sharing it at the time. A trip home, a wrestling match with Maggie to get not only the eye drops (HATE) into her but also the special treat of ear drops (DOUBLE HATE). Do you know that she is very strong?

The live-culture yogurt will flow freely in our house, since both girls are on antibiotics for the next few days.

*Grammy hasn't been a nurse for years, and her whole philosophy has changed. As she reads this, she's melting with sympathy for her precious babies (not to mention shitting bricks at my non-parenting).

Weekend Update

We spent a couple days with friends at their cabin at Donner Lake (a tinier, cuter Tahoe). I skiied and then skiied some more, Maggie slept badly, Molly wet her bed because I forgot to put a diaper on her (yeah, I'm a moron; no, she's not even THINKING about being night-trained, nor am I the least bit interested in trying). Nobody got altitude sickness (DUG). I did wrench my knee something fierce after stupidly thinking "Man, these green runs are for suckers. Let's go blue!". I would have been the one you saw sliding the rest of the way down on her ass. On purpose. I have no shame (TSYOWLIMH was positively apoplectic).

On the way home Molly mentioned that her eye hurt, and, TADA! Pinkeye! It was obviously bacterial, so I was able to treat it right away with antibiotic drops and she'll be good to go for school tomorrow. Both girls also have runny noses, though Molly's is hardly of note. Maggie's is lousy though and combined with a cough. Again, I don't get it. Molly lives on a multivitamin and milk. Maggie eats brussels sprouts. Nothing adds up.

I treat both of the girls with children's formula OTC drugs--they're cheaper and come in bigger bottles than infant formula, and there's nothing shittier than grabbing that teensy little bottle of Tylenol or cough medicine and finding that it's empty (after only using it a couple of times, too). Cleared it with our pediatrician, aka "Dr. Whatever", and I check everything against the dosage charts at AskDrSears.com, then write the correct dosage for each kid on the side of the bottle with a Sharpie so I don't have to look it up every time (or remember, which is not bloody likely to happen).

While Maggie napped today, Molly sat down and performed the forced labor of writing her first name twenty times on the backs of her Valentine cards. The first few were awesome. The second few, she didn't bother with the "Y", which is always a little bit of a challenge for her. The last few just had "M"s.

And I've started a side project, still in its infancy: my craft blog. It's boring as hell, but it might get better. Shield your eyes from the colors--I'm playing with templates, and it won't always be fuchsia.

Sickening.

Maggie has a cold, and she is not a good invalid. She is okay with the noseblowing and medicine taking, but at night, she wakes up miserable--even after a dose of "night formula" cold medicine--and the process goes like this:

She wakes up. We hear her. We send "Go back to sleep" vibes down the hall. It works.

She wakes up. We vibe her, it fails. We go down the hall, pat her on the back, she goes right back to sleep. We repeat this a few times.

She wakes up. The vibing fails, the patting fails. She is fully awake and miserable now. We bring her into our bed. She crawls around, tosses and turns, gets stuck in the covers ("STUCK! STUCK!") several times, I shush her, Dug shushes me, Molly comes in to see where the hell her sister is, decides to join us, I am now squished between two children, one of them has her toes up my bum, the other one is reclining comfortably on my neck, my low-functioning wee-hours brain really wants me to go curl up in Molly's bed or on the couch but I'm afraid to move because a) the kids might just follow me b) I'm afraid that if I'm not between them, the girls will go free-for-all on one another and Dug will be stuck with them and then be ticked at me for abandoning him.

There comes a point during all of this where I just wish it was morning so we could all stop pretending to try to go to sleep. Later in the morning, I cake on the hard core concealer. I don't think I'm fooling anyone.

Molly is somehow jealous of her sister's cold. She's all fake-coughing, begging for medicine (!?!). Throwing actual tantrums when I won't dose her. In a way, though I know I'm going straight to hell for saying so, I am kind of peeved that she isn't sick, because it blows every known scientific fact about healthy diet and immune system strength right out of the water. Who knew that the road to health was paved with refined flour and cheese? Maybe she is some kind of mutant. Maybe I should donate her to science.

Anyway, I don't know what there is to be jealous of. The hacking, mucousy cough? The ropes of snot? The crusty boogers that I have to gently peel off with the help of a damp washcloth a few times a day?

Meanwhile I am trying to avoid the cold myself. Extra hand-washing, taking my vitamins, drinking lots of water. I can't get sick. Who will peel my boogers for me?