So, the other test we did in addition to the blood work was a urine test.  Think about it… you must collect urine from an infant.  How the heck!??!  You can’t squeeze it out of a diaper, that would be too easy… no.. they give you this little bag that has a foam ring with adhesive on it and you actually stick it to your baby’s sensitive skin. I don’t know… I can’t decide if the blood draw was worse, or if removing the bag was worse!  She didn’t really cry much at the removal of the bag, but I’m SURE it did not feel good!! 

Results are back, and Vienna does indeed have a UTI, so now we start antibiotics.  She’s had her first round already… but at least we have some answers to the week long fever. 

Now, where’s the medication for mommy and daddy??  Oh yeah… that’s the bucket o’ in the freezer!!!   Medication time!!!!! 

THEY TOOK MY BLOOD!!!

Poor Vienna, she’s had a rough week.  I feel it! I’m sure she feels it more though.  We’ve struggled for a week now with a fever.  She’s been all over the map with it, getting as high as 104 degrees.  We went to the doctor two days ago and he didn’t find anything, we figured her fever would go away with one more day since it had gone down before back up that day.  But the next night proved scary.  She got chilled and her temp went sooo low she was cold and clammy!!! and she had the shakes!  That was freaky.  Within an hour she went from 96.4 temp to 103.2 temp… yeah, NOT fun. That was my third night without sleep, so I wasn’t thinking so well or we would probably have taken her to the urgent care.  Sam was calm and we checked her a while later and she was back down. But the next day she was still having a fever.  So, since her doctor was on vacation, we saw a new doctor. Very young (like MY age or younger even, which I’m not used to in doctors) but very nice. He ordered some tests.  So, what started off as a day I thought I could get some groceries and get some rest… we wound up at the doctors and ultimately at the hospital to have some lab work done.

So, we go to the hospital because they don’t like to do baby blood draws in doctors offices. We meet the nicest nurses who are going to vampireise, i mean, draw Vienna’s blood.  They try to distract her by giving her a Cookie Monster toy, nice try, but yeah, no go! (still it was very sweet).  So.. down to business…

Have you ever had to have your one year old’s blood drawn??  Yeah, it’s NOT a fun experience!!  They sit YOU in a chair and have you put your baby on your lap. These two HUGE nurses, I swear one lady was six foot, walk up and stands infront of you and your baby.  That’s scary enough, even though the nurses were the SWEETEST ladies, still so tall and hovering over her I think scared her.  Thankfully Vienna has good veins.  So, one nurse holds her arm straight, the other actually draws the blood (for Sam’s sake I’ll spare that description, he’s not so keen on medical stuff).  All the while YOU are expected to keep your baby from squirming and moving her body or worse yet trying to grab the needle with her free hand… NOT FUN! Though, I’d much rather do that then send her off on her own to have total strangers do all this to her alone.  SCREAMSSSSSS emit from my daughters mouth… I’m sure they can hear her clear up at the reception area that we walked in from… mind you, this is a good 100 yards away!  Grandma reports that the other man just outside the lab room said “oh that poor baby.” He sure gave her a nice smile when we left the room.

I must say my daughter is still quite a trooper.  She screamed loud and hard… but not for long.  She was back to normal fairly quickly.  We went down to the cafeteria and got a banana to eat right after that and then got the results from the doctors office.  All looked well as far as infection went with her blood work… but we did find out that she is low on iron so, we’ll be pushing iron foods and taking iron drops… but the saga didn’t end there…  More to come this afternoon on the trauma that is diagnosis!

There’s something under our house. Since I’ve been up the past few nights with Vienna I’ve been hearing a scratching sound. Wouldn’t you guess it, the sounds is directly… yep, under Vienna’s room floor!  Why couldn’t it be under our floor where I would know/hear it come into the house if it is actually trying to do that, instead of making me paranoid that some animal is trying to get into Vienna’s room! 

Now, I’m not a pansy, I’ve lived with mice, I’ve lived with cockroaches, drunks in the stairwell and missing light bulbs in the hall.  In my soviet apartment living so close to others, you just accept that sometimes these things will be a part of life.  However, having a baby in the house… NO! Not gonna happen, Don’t like it, can’t stand it, won’t tolerate it!!  All those germs near my baby’s tiny little body… humm… yea…

So, I got Sam out of bed. He had to hear it!  Yeah, it’s somewhere between Vienna’s wall and the bathroom wall… but it sounds like it’s near the duct system, and it sounds MUCH bigger than a mouse.  So, we get dressed… sorta… and start searching for flashlights.  We look everywhere… we just bought a huge nice one, but all we can find are these two dinky little things… one of which is completely useless.  We head outside in the cool fall air and smell… SKUNK! It dawns on us how often we’ve smelt skunk in our back yard… so we walk the perimeter of the house looking for… I don’t know, anything that would give us a clue.  Not really finding anything we head back to the area where the sounds were coming from.  There’s a panel there that vents the dryer hose from the laundry room.  But Sam won’t remove it. He doesn’t want to face the back end of a skunk… but there is just the faintest smell of skunk, but you can smell it more down by the vent….

Now, my dad swears it’s not a skunk or we’d be smelling it in the house all the time.  Neither Sam or Dad are convinced it’s a mouse either.  That leaves cats.  There are several candidates in this area.  There’s Tanker (Yes, I’ve named the stray cats). Tanker is a gray male cat who has been hurt sooo many times. A few weeks ago he was limping really badly, but he seems better now.  He likes to lay in the sun in our back yard.  I don’t know if he belongs to anyone, but he doesn’t have a collar so I don’t think he does.  Then there’s Tiddles, the ginger cat… short for Tiddly Winks, cause he/she seems to wink a lot (he or she because it’s not as obvious as it is with Tanker).  Tiddles likes to walk around our place like it owns the place.  You’ll often find it on the front porch during the day or setting off our motion light at night. 

At this point I’m pulling for it to be a cat.  It’d be great, mouse deterrant and no stinkies.  But how do you find out??  I’m all for pulling off that panel… maybe we’ll have to do that this evening… I mean, what’s the big deal, I’ve watched Myth Busters. If anyone’s seen the skunk episode, they couldn’t get a skunk to spray them, and they had several remedies on there that seemed to work… besides it’s only temporary…. now to convince Sam that it’s worth his taking the risk ***big cheezy grin!!***

Vienna’s been having a high fever for three days now. This is when it’s tough being a mom.  I don’t mind that I’m sick myself and I stayed up with her all night (yes, all night, I got maybe 2 hours total sleep one night and maybe 3-4 the next) that’s not the hard part.  The hard part is seeing my typically energetic 1 year old, melt into a little blob who just wants to lay there and cry; little heart pounding a million beats per second and huffing and puffing to breathe.  Harder still is to watch her refuse meal after meal. Especially knowing she’s under weight to begin with. 

Thankfully she has been drinking her electrolyte & apple juice mix quite well.  Chugging it often actually.  But how good of a replacement can that be for food.  She’s been falling down a lot today, and a little shaky as well.  I finally called the doctor’s office today.  Since her fever was down this morning, but back up this afternoon, they told me to wait until tomorrow.  Apparently there’s a bad cold with sore throat going around, which is what I have. The sore throat is probably why she’s not eating. But here’s a mother’s question… how the stink do you KNOW!?!?!?  **big sigh** I’m sure time will tell, but if the fever gets back up to the 102 range again we’re going to urgent care, no matter what the cost!

Sam gave Vienna  a  nice bath to cool her down. She smells lovely, and she even looks much better than yesterday. I on the other hand STINK, not just stink, I stink and I’m covered from shoulder to knee in baby snot.  Hopefully a hot shower will loosen my sore joints and relieve some of the sinus headache…

I’m going to take a shower before I finish the laundry.  Since she’s not taking in solids, the stuff she is intaking is exiting, well, it should be solid, but it’s not… so all 4 sets of sheets now are dirty (I thought we had only three, but I found another sheet set in the back of the drawer… as well as a half matrices pad, so… that was soiled at her last nap…) **big sigh**  it’s days like today where a shaved head and tatoo’d makeup sounds fantastic (better yet, a beauty team that can do my face and hair and nails while I sleep… ahhhh to win the lotto).

I’m not really complaining.  I don’t mind the laundry, I don’t even really mind stinking so much… I just want to be able to make my baby comfortable and happy again.  But for now what I can do is de-stinkafy so that my daughter doesn’t have to be uncomfortable and feel nauseated by her mother at the same time!!! 

I love having an American sized washer and dryer… someday I’d like to upgrade to a tumble system one, but for now I’m just thankful that I can do huge loads of laundry at a time (though my mother is dismayed that I don’t separate my clothes better). 

Today’s going to be a laundry day… that is… if I have any breath left inbetween “NO! Vienna, No, put it back… Vienna, come here, Vienna, No…” Vienna also has a nasty cold… so if I can keep the snot from being wipped all over the furniture and floor and stuff, that would be great.  I’m not even asking for her to have no snot on her face… just not all over the house!! 

And how in the heck do you figure out if a baby has a soar throat or not?!??!  Sam has one, and her cold seems to be buggig her more than a cold, but is it her throat? her teeth? (she’s pushing a few more in now) or just the cold??  humm…

But hey, there’s no fever, and at least the floors are vacuumed so never mind the toys everywhere and the cans & jars that have been purged from the pantry… or the diaper bag that my little clepto has taken and hidden all of the contents around the house…  

Life’s still good