The abiding New Year's Crud

So, Sophia has been sick to one degree or another since the 31st of December. It started with a bad cough and by Friday blossomed into a delightful fever. For nap time I must admit that I am not the Sophia Whisperer and resort to the time honored tradition of loading her up in my truck at 11:30 after feeding her a big lunch and driving in a meandering path up Emigration Canyon and back down I-80. She usually is fast asleep by the time I get to my exit and thence, home. So if you come by my house any given weekend, in the early afternoon (if it's not too cold out) you'll see me there in my driveway reading a book with a sleeping two year old in the car seat. On the Friday in question is was a little too cold so after she napped for about an hour (she usually goes 2.5 hours) she wanted to come in and nap on me, as I sit on the couch. And as my dear wife says, 23 of her 25 lbs resides in her humongous noggin, so I got to enjoy her head crushing down on my collar bone for another hour or so. But it's hard to complain since she's such a stinkin' cutie. After she woke up she still felt nappy, so I got her cot out for her to rest on:

I'd been feeding her children's Tylenol to keep her fever below 102° F every 4 hours as recommended and was waiting for 6:30 to come when we could do another dose. She got really lethargic around 5 and started napping on me, and when Abbey got home at 5:30 and decided to check her temperature it was back up to almost 105°! So we got her to gag down some berry flavored Ibuprofen since you can stack acetaminophen and Ibuprofen without ill effects and then decided we needed to get her to the IHC KidsCare down the street ASAP. We got registered and then the panic started to wear off and the Ibuprofen started to take hold. As Sophia started playing with her toys more and more delightedly we realized after two hours we might not need to see the doctor after all. By the time she was trying to get into the elevator over and over and open the front doors with all her might we decided to throw in the towel and leave all the other sick kids there with one less person to wait in line behind.

Though the worst was over, it was still an emotionally draining challenge. Like when Sophia decided she'd rather die than take anymore of the Berry flavored Motrin. Fine we'll switch back to the Tylenol - oh no, now all medicine type liquids are suspect and result in a high piercing wail of I've-just-been-murdered proportions. So I get to be bad Cop and wrangle her limbs immobile and quick as a bunny shoot the two doses into her mouth as she fights me tooth and nail. Awful. We started to get tricky trying to sneak the NSAIDs into snacks, but didn't have any success and ended getting puked on for our trouble. She REALLY does not like the berry flavor I guess. By the time I'd purchased Bubblegum flavor, Grape Flavor and childrens chewable tablets her fever had broken leaving me hoping she'd get sick again before the stuff all expires. She's still got that intermittent cough though and has been getting up in the night; an hour after we put her to sleep, or like this morning she got up at 3:47am and I had to sit and rock her for an hour or so before she'd go back to sleep. I just really hope this is the tail end of things and it's not something we'll need to get her treatment for.

On a positive note the holidays on the whole were pretty fun - Sophia got to sing in her Day Care assembly. Here she is performing "Jingle Bells":

She got a ton of toys for Christmas, including a giant robotic Dinosaur she's kind of afraid of.

And a magic painting set she's too young for. She loves the heck out of the paint, but she JAMS her paintbrush into the paint cups as hard as she can and then smears it wildly and thickly across her paper. So we'll limit her to the bath paint where she can paint with her fingers until she's a little older.

Enough b-logging for today.

SH