Poor Dirk… chalk it up to bad luck(hopefully not bad karma) but we have had a very unlucky run the past five weeks at our house. Gabe and I can’t help but ponder, ” What next?”.
This weekend- Scorpion and hotel stay- Toilet in master makes monster noises, which means they re-installed it wrong(go figure)- Grout stains throughout the house(picture me turning redder as I reminisce) and above all that our boy is feeling under the weather.
Dirk has had a cough for the last week and a half, his nose is stuffy and he has a hard time breathing while eating/laying down/in general. We have propped up his crib on one side an inch to help him breath, had a warm humidifier running in his room at night, saline/suction nose 3x a day and had him be in the bathroom after a shower for more steam power. The past 48 hours were especially hard on him and his cough got progressively worse. After a coughing/screaming fit Sunday evening we decided to call our pediatricians on-call office for advice. The Dr. listened to his cough through the phone and agreed that we should probably go in to an urgent care center. We went to Phoenix Children’s Hospital Urgent Care center and were seen immediately. Dirk’s lungs are doing well- he doesn’t have pneumonia or a fever and the Dr. wanted us to continue the at-home remedies for a couple of more days because she thinks its just a really bad cold. We were going to do the pertussis test but it is invasive and frankly if he has whooping cough(which it doesn’t sound like he does-thank goodness) it would just mean that he has to fight through the pain because other than making it less contagious- the treatment does not help them recover from the sickness- incredibly lame. If he gets worse in the next day or so we were told to go in and get the test.
Well next Monday Dirk will go in for his 2 month shots early(because of our trip to WA) and one of the vaccines he will be receiving is the pertussis vaccine. As a parent with a newborn I find it incredibly disheartening that some parents choose not to vaccinate their children against pertussis. It would be fine if their choice didn’t inherently effect the people around them, but it does. If their child is older, didn’t have the vaccine and gets whooping cough they can spread the bacterial infection to those that do not yet have antibodies built up to fight such a disease. That is one of the reasons the majority of deaths from the disease are infants under 2 months of age. I know that vaccines are hotly debated now but I don’t think that it is fair in the instance of whooping cough. This definitely has to do with our scare last night. Sorry for the rant- but this new mom is incredibly protective of her little one.
We were still able to go through Dirk’s bedtime routine last night- feed-bath-top off feeding-bed. He went down at about 9:30PM and didn’t get up until 3:30AM! I’m not going to jinx it and discuss that it may or may not have been the most continuous sleep he and I have had ever… because well… we need all of the good luck, jui jui, and good karma to come our way : ).
Let’s hope he feels better!
Now I am just waiting for the tile guys to come(they are over an hour late) and do the finishing touches on our master bathroom… its raining here which means that they probably will be really late because “It is hard to drive in the rain.”-A typical reason why traffic gets crazy here in Arizona… they just aren’t used to driving in it… or working outside in it… this Washingtonian thinks its bull.
On the To-Do List for the construction:
- Finish tile
- Clean up grout mess
- Have plumber come in and install the remaining shower head trim/valve
- Pick out shower door- set delivery date and installation from Home Depot
- Use shower before we seal up hole in kitchen to ensure there are no more small, slow leaks
- Hire general contractor
- Install insulation in kitchen ceiling
- Seal up ceiling
- Paint ceiling
- Done- Hopefully
Happy Monday! Fingers crossed that we have a GREAT DAY! <3
