Getting Healthy Again

It was a bright spot last week when I noticed Eli was smiling again. He was pretty miserable with the croup, the steroid med., and just feeling lousy. By the end of the week, he was back to his normal self, playing, dancing, running, etc.

Charlie is teething once again, and he has been waking up at horrible hours in the morning – often between 4:30 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. and not going back to bed for a few hours. Then Eli wakes up and the day keeps going…

…and I am absolutely exhausted! Oh Charlie. SLEEP LATER!!!! (today was no exception – we’ve been up since 5:45 and he is still going strong – it’s 8:30 now)

I have this cream blanket that I love. It is the softest, coziest throw and it keeps me warm in our chilly family room.

Of course, it’s such a cozy blanket that someone else likes it even more. He calls it “mommy’s blankie.” No, it’s not my blankie, but I like that he named it. There were a few nights last week when Eli woke up in the middle of the night crying (night terrors) and the only thing that calmed him down was when I brought this blanket into his crib - he would snuggle and go back to sleep.

This picture is deceiving – like Eli might be tired enough to take a little rest on the blanket. No way! Charlie sucks his thumb when he’s sitting on it, I think because the blanket reminds him of his blankie that he sleeps with.

Here are some pictures from one early morning last week. Charlie loves having full reign to the toys without Eli around to yell at him.

See the pictures above? Those were before Thursday, when Charlie fell onto the corner of our shoe bench near our side door and got a small gash on his face. It was horrible!! I took pictures and emailed them to Ben – I didn’t know if I should take him to the doctor or not. But the bleeding stopped and the gash isn’t very big, so I think it was okay to leave it alone. Poor Charlie. I felt so, so bad, but I know he’s at the busy, bumpy, tipsy walking phase and will have more bumps and spills.

Back to the blanket. Eli likes to wrap up in my blanket to watch a show.

Sweet boy.

And here’s Charlie’s cut, starting to scab over. I think it is healing pretty fast.

And finally, go check out the sales at Gap!! I picked up these cow pjs for Eli for $7. And stocked up on stuff for next year. A few days ago, all sale stuff was an additional 50% off.

Random things from the week – Eli now adds a different ending to “no” when he answers you negatively - “NO-ah” but still keeps his forceful “NOOOOO” when he’s telling Charlie no.

Charlie’s word of the week is cracker! I love hearing him babble and practice his language skills. Most of the time he just says “mama” and “dada” but cracker was a fun one.

Croup and a Clean House

Eli has had croup since Saturday evening, and I took him to the doctor on Sunday morning to make sure everything was okay with his breathing. It was fine, but the doctor prescribed a steroid to help ease the croup symptoms for the next couple of days. This was a blessing and a curse – he had a lot less of the typical croup coughing (the barking, wheezing kind of cough), but it made him jittery, agitated, and he did not sleep well on Sunday night, day 1 of the drug.

This translated into very little sleep for me, and by Monday afternoon I was completely wiped out, with no hope that Eli would nap (he apparently has toddler superpowers and doesn’t nap even while sick – who does that???). A wise friend suggested that I bring him up to my bed with me, put a movie on the portable DVD player, and nap next to him while he watched the show. Genius! It wasn’t perfect, as Eli occasionally bounced on the bed or accidentally pulled the DVD player’s plug out from squirming around, but I got some rest and felt like I could function for the rest of the day (Charlie was napping at the same time).

I was praying that Eli would sleep through the night last night. And he did, thank goodness – I got eight hours of sleep! Amazing how good that feels. Today, Eli seemed less agitated, but was pretty hyper, which I think is also related to the steroid still in his system.

“Mom, it’s time for exercise!!” he said many times, running back and forth from the living room, through the office hall and back to the family room’s glass screen door. At one point I decided to join him; after all, I needed to burn off all of  the stress calories I’d consumed over the last few days when my kids were making me crazy, both screaming/crying at once since crying seems to be contagious between the boys… (peanut m&ms and some homemade treats were my coping measures from the last few days – ugh, so not healthy!! I swear I don’t eat like this all the time). Eli and I raced back and forth together, with Charlie sitting in the middle of the raceway, laughing at the craziness.

My dad came down this afternoon to give me a break while my mom was teaching piano lessons near us, so I ran around for a few hours, blissfully getting 10 errands done that would have taken me at least a week if I was toting my kids around. Thank you dad!! I was starting to feel trapped at home with the sick kids, so it was good to get things done and be out of the house.

Tonight Ben hosted his book group at our house, so we tucked the kids into bed pretty early and ran around the house, cleaning up, sweeping, putting toys away and getting the main floor in order. It’s always nice to have an excuse to make things tidy and clean.

Once the guys arrived, I left to exercise at the gym. It was later in the evening, so the gym wasn’t crowded and I got a good workout in, finishing with stretching on the mats and taking deep breaths. I left feeling renewed and ready to face hopefully a better day tomorrow.

On my drive home, I passed the hospital and thought about my friend Stephanie, whose sister in Atlanta is in the ICU after a pregnancy gone majorly awry (I’m talking in vague terms, but it’s really serious). Rachael’s body went into toxic shock and her kidneys are failing, she is breathing with a respirator, and tonight I learned that a doctor punctured one of her lungs while trying to change her many tubes out because they can’t figure out what is causing her fever, so they’re hoping new, clean tubing will help. Seriously??

Because of everything going on, Rachael has been in a medically induced coma since last week. My heart hurts for Stephanie and her family, for Rachael’s daughters that are 2 and 3 years old, for her husband… each time that I have talked to Stephanie in the last week, I’ve had instant tears when she first starts talking and I could feel the weight of her exhaustion and the emotional roller coaster it has been through the phone. My thoughts and prayers are with her family. It is such a sad, horrible, difficult thing they are all going through.

So after that sad note, I’m going to change the tone a little with a few pictures. First, of Charlie who is happy to not be hurting from his ear infection anymore.

 

In fact, he’s so happy that he constantly does yoga poses, like downward dog.

And below are friends who tried to cheer me up yesterday when my kids were being so difficult. Rachael (different girl than the Rachael mentioned above) was in town over the weekend, visiting from Cleveland, so we had fun catching up. She and Khania came over to share lunch with me on my very long, miserable day. Eli was pretty awful all day long (which meant Charlie would cry about half the time too), so this was a bright spot, and meant a lot considering Rachael had a flight to catch that afternoon and didn’t have much time. We put my camera on the self timer and took this funny shot. I don’t think you can tell how exhausted I was, but I could barely keep my eyes open, I was so tired. But their coming over last minute forced me to clean things up a little, which always brightens your mood too.

And here’s a shot from yesterday when I got desperate for some peace and put Barney on for the kids to watch. Poor Eli. I hope he wakes up tomorrow feeling normal again. You know I’m desperate when I’m willing to have Barney going in the background…

Arctic Winter

It’s been a cold and snowy January. So I always try to make the best of our dreary winters by taking some fun photos of our frigid land. On Saturday, I met my friend Rachael at the beach to take some pictures of the snow/ice covering the first part of the water. It was crazy to see how far out this went over the water.

It was SO cold. We were bundled up, but I was still shivering under all of my layers.

I was really, really tempted to walk out on the ice to get some cool shots. But I held back because of spots like these – it just didn’t seem smart.

So I got a lot of shots of the crazy huge waves beating against the ice from a distance:

It was really neat seeing the water crash at different points along the shore. Keep in mind that most of the snow/ice chunks shown in this picture are covering water.


It was such a nice cloudy day at the beach. I love expressive cloud formations.




I love this building (it’s an art center) – I know I often post pictures of it, but it’s fun to see how different the scene looks depending on the weather.


Here’s Rachael getting some shots:

Pretty berries sticking up in a little plot of land in the parking lot:




And back at home, there were lots and lots of icicles.

So… you would think one visit to the beach on a 15-degree day would be enough. But when I came home and told Ben how cool it was to see the waves crashing on the ice and snow, he decided to go check it out too. He went to a different beach, then came home and was telling me all about it when Eli heard him and decided he wanted to see it too. So we threw on all of our winter gear and piled into the car.

Ben was smart and grabbed our sled – this was a gift from Santa and so fun that both boys could ride on it together. Charlie was especially loving it since this was his first experience on a sled.


However, notice that his mittens have come off almost instantly…

The snow wasn’t too deep where we were walking, but it was still slick enough for Ben to pull them along.




The waves at this beach were even more huge!! These teenage boys were walking on the ice, so I snapped some shots of them to give perspective of how far out the ice went and how large the waves were.






While I took more pictures, Ben was busy pulling the kids on the sled on the ice. Though at one point they were both out of the sled and Eli kept falling on the ice. But he loved it and kept calling himself a hockey guy.

I think it’s so funny to see Eli in his big puffy coat and tiny legs/boots.

Charlie started to get cold (we seriously tried putting his gloves on 10 more times, but he kept yanking them off). His poor nose turned red pretty fast.

I was enthralled with the massive waves and tried to get a closer look from a semi-safe vantage point on some snow-covered rocks.


Pretty cool for Lake Michigan.

There were these huge icebergs all over the place.

After about 10 minutes outside, Charlie started SCREAMING. Like uncontrollable screaming. Ben tucked him into his jacket and raced back to the car to warm him up, and I trudged along with Eli in the sled, who was starting to look cold and tired as well (little did I know that he would have the croupy cough that night).

When I got to the car, Charlie was ballistic. I have never seen him so upset. He was screaming, throwing himself around, crying, and I started to get really worried he might have frostbite. I tried nursing him to calm him down, but he started crying again after a few seconds. We sang to him, talked calmly, tried to warm his hands, etc. and nothing was snapping him out of it. The last thing I could think of was to pull a lollipop out of my coat pocket (I don’t remember why it was in there, but thank goodness for the lolli), and he immediately started eating it, calming down after a few seconds. I was majorly relieved that he could hold the lollipop, but felt so sorry he had been so miserable and worked up. Poor Charlie!

On our way out of the beach/park, we saw some guys playing hockey on the ice. Eli loved seeing real hockey guys :)

Before I end this long post, I want to jot some things down about the boys while I’m thinking about them:

1. Charlie loves to click his tongue – it’s really cute. He clicks his tongue and then looks right at you to make sure you notice. I usually click back to him, which makes him smile.

2. I tried giving Charlie a sippy cup with formula last week, figuring it had been a while since he’d had any and maybe he would drink it. Nope! He took a few sips, then got this awful look on his face and started wiping his tongue! It was hilarious. He turns one next week and then we’ll try to push the whole milk and stop nursing soon.

3. Eli has said some funny stuff lately – for example:

“Dad, I have something to tell you. First of all….” this was when we picked up Ben from the train last week, and Eli told him about falling outside on the sidewalk when we went to the post office.

Sort of related, Eli is very into telling stories. Over the weekend, Eli told Ben some elaborate story about a train and then said, “That was a long story, daddy.”

And the story he has told me multiple times usually starts with, “Mama, I have a story to tell you. Once upon a time, there was a train with a red caboose…”

4. Eli really likes when Ben builds him a fort. They build them often in the basement using the slide and other toys to hold it up.

5. Charlie doesn’t say a whole lot yet, besides Dada and Mama. But sometimes it sounds like he’s saying, “Hi!” when we hold the phone up to his ear, and other times we have thought he has said, “Here!” He babbles constantly though, so I’m excited to hear more words in the next year.