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We’ve had a long 24 hours.  I put The Tot down at 6:30 last night after a long, fussy day and settled in to watch the last episodes of the Scrubs – The Complete First Season DVD I had rented from Netflix.  I got through the last one just as Tater Tot woke up fussing.  Since she had a blow out diaper yesterday and a fever, I figured I should go in and change her when normally I would let her “work it out” unless she was crying hard.  I changed her and started rocking her when I felt her twitch.  And twitch.  And twitch some more.  Unlike any other falling-asleep twitching I had experienced with her.  It happened about every 3-5 seconds for about 15 minutes but she wasn’t falling asleep.  She was drowsy, for sure, but she didn’t fall asleep. So I got scared.  Particularly since she had a fever and I knew that kids with fevers could have seizures.  I called the Nurse Hotline and they tried to get ahold of the pediatrician on call.  No luck.  They recommended that I take her in, which I did.  Oh, Good Lord, what a freak show there was at our local ER.  I had no idea. Honestly.  

Unfortunately, Tater Tot had to have her temperature taken rectally not only once, but twice.  I had hoped to avoid that lovely experience in her childhood but I guess it wasn’t meant to be.  She was decidedly unhappy about the whole experience.  Even the benign stuff like the sticker they put on her to find her pulse.  It’s just a sticker!  But she wailed like a banshee.  Between the necessary stuff was the waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting some more.  She was perfectly happy to look at all the new surroundings and “interesting” people and babble to Mommy and Daddy.  So we stood around (she wouldn’t let me sit) waiting for 2 1/2 hours until the doc got to us.  I described what I felt and he asked detailed questions about it.  You know what it was?  The doc thought it was pre-sleep twitches.  Admittedly at an unusual frequency and duration but pre-sleep twitches nonetheless.  Back off, Ladies, Mother of The Year is mine! 

So we spent three hours in the middle of the night at the ER because my daughter was sleepy and twitching.  Huh.  That made me feel pretty stupid.  Even though I feel moderately stupid, I know I did the right thing.  I had not known the difference between a febrile seizure and pre-sleep twitches (myoclonic movements) and now I do.  If something had happened to Princess Tater Tot because I didn’t look into it, I would never have been able to forgive myself.  Sometimes I wish I could be more laid back but I’m just not.  “Better safe than sorry”.

Needless to say, we’ve had an unusual day since neither of us got enough sleep.  The schedule was screwed and I just “winged it” all day.  I’ll be relieved when it’s tomorrow afternoon and we have a better idea of what is wrong with her (and what isn’t)!

Yes, it happened: the poo that I was afraid was going to scare me away from cloth diapers.  Today Princess Tater Tot was a Fussybutt.  All day but in particular around lunch time.  She still had a fever, wouldn’t eat and didn’t like sitting in her high chair (both highly unusual) and would only calm down when I put on Baby Einstein.  After the video I thought I’d take her upstairs to play when I felt some leaks and thought “Wow, that was fast.”  Cloth diapers have usually lasted a lot longer.  I didn’t notice any smell until I opened the diaper.  Sweet Jesus!  Dijon mustard poo everywhere.  Blech.  What an opportune time to have a bath!  I don’t know how I managed to get the diaper off without her getting a hand or foot in it but the changing pad cover did end up being a casualty.  I set the diaper aside to deal with later and we went on about our bathing and dressing.

I don’t know if I subconsciously thought if I ignored the diaper it would go away or if I genuinely forgot about it.  But after a while, the Heinous Poo would not be ignored.  I realized that I was smelling it from our room across the hall!  So, leaving The Tot briefly to retrieve the diaper, I set out trying to get it reasonably clean in my bathroom so I could keep her in my sight while she was playing.  With previous poos, a dunk or two in the toilet would get everything but the stains off.  But, oh no, not this time!  Dunk, dunk, dunk.  Dunk, dunk.  Dunk. Flush.  Dunk, dunk, dunk.  Oh crap.  It’s not working.  So, I decided instead to trap one end by putting the seat down over it so the rest could soak in the toilet.  Twenty minutes.  Dunk, dunk, dunk.  Flush.  What is this, SuperPoo?  I’m not sure this particular diaper will ever recover but I’m going to try my best to rehabilitate it.  It won’t be easy and it definitely won’t be pretty.

Did it scare me away from cloth diapers?  No.  But let’s just say I’ll be using disposables until The Princess feels a little better. 

The Princess has a fever.  No vomiting, diarrhea, runny nose, or cough.  Just a fever.  This is only the third time she’s ever had a fever and it got as high as 103.8 yesterday.  Yikes!  Of course I was on the phone to the pediatrician who told me to give her Tylenol and to come in today.  And, of course her fever is down quite a bit today.  It’s the Unwritten Rule: any time The Mommy makes an appointment for some ailment that The Tater Tot has, the ailment automatically goes away by the time we get there. They really must think I’m crazy at the pediatrician’s office.  Oh, they act like it’s all good but you know when I leave they’re saying “There goes the paranoid Momma”!  The upside of all of this is that I know how to cure whatever ails The Tot.  I just have to make a doctor’s appointment for her and it will go away!

It was great to see her laughing and more active today, though.  Yesterday all she wanted to do was rock in the rocking chair with The Mommy and hum.  So we rocked and hummed.  Hummed and rocked.  It was very sweet but I knew she really didn’t feel well because she usually won’t sit still for very long to rock and hum.  And because she didn’t want to eat.  Now that’s unusual.  All she’d eat the past two days is cereal, quesadillas, and tortillas with almond butter.  Go figure.

Turns out it’s probably a virus but we’ll know more after the next couple of days.  Better go stock up on Tylenol.

I just finished reading Babyproofing Your Marriage: How to Laugh More, Argue Less, and Communicate Better as Your Family Grows by Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O’Neill, and Julia Stone, three friends who decided to investigate whether the phenomena they experienced after having children happened to others as well.  I thought I was the only one.  Seriously.  I thought that nobody else went through the—ahem—interesting relationship changes or random, sometimes not-entirely-rational feelings that I did after Princess Tater Tot was born.  Okay, maybe not the only one.  I had heard from various sources that your relationship changes when you have a baby but I definitely did not have any idea how it changes.  Or how I would change.  Why doesn’t anyone want to tell you what’s really going to happen when you have a baby?  Hm.  A question for another post.  Let’s just say that, if I had read this book BTT (Before Tater Tot), I would have been much more prepared for what was ahead.

All three of these women have held or currently hold high-powered career-oriented jobs and have seven children between them.  But they don’t just write about their own experiences, they used this opportunity as a wonderful excuse to ask other women and men deeply personal and embarrassing questions to verify their suspicions!  And do you know what?  These men and women answered.  Candidly.  Graphically. Sometimes hilariously.  

I have to tell you, from the moment I began reading this book, I felt “normal”.  And my understanding of the Daddy perspective increased tremendously!  Men and women are just different and these women really succeeded in giving both sides of the story.  Stacie, Cathy, and Julia use many direct quotes from men and women other than themselves and their husbands to illustrate their points.  They tell it like it is, no holds barred.  From the “10 O’clock Shoulder Tap” to “The Mommy Chip”, it’s all in there! The humor infused with the use of euphemisms for some of the most difficult relationship issues had me rolling as well as nodding my head in agreement.  And they don’t just deal with the marital relationship.  They tackle the in-laws, too!  I would definitely recommend this book, whether you’re on your first child or your third.  If you’ve got more than three already, God help ya’!  I was the second of four and to this day I have no idea how my mother retained her sanity!

 

Being a conscientious (neurotic?) Mommy, I have tried to remain aware of the activities I “should” be doing with The Tot at the different developmental stages.  I have tried for a couple of months now to demonstrate to The Tater Tot how to stack things but every time I get more than two objects on top of each other, she grabs the middle one and yanks it out!  It’s kinda funny.  I think it’s our game now: Mommy scrambles to get things stacked before Destructo Girl comes along and bashes them all to pieces.  She does it with her Baby Einstein Blocks , little Shape Sorter Shapes (Mommy has made some very interesting structures with these!), the little ring stacker thingy, and just about anything else I try to arrange for her.  The latest thing being the laundry.  I was folding and stacking the laundry while she was cruising around the living room furniture and WHAMO!  Stack on the ground.  Giggle, giggle.  Then I thought I’d be clever and arrange the empty water bottles like bowling pins and teach her how to roll the ball.  Yep.  You guessed it—I had no sooner gotten the first two rows arranged than she speed-crawled to where I was and bashed them down!  So we spent the next ten minutes with The Mommy rushing to get the “pins” up and roll the ball before Destructo Girl bashed the heck outta them.  It was fun!  As long as I don’t become intent on actually completing the learning objective that I set out to, we’re just fine!  And she has fun, which is the most important thing to me.  She’ll learn everything just fine if she’s a happy and well-adjusted child.  She’ll just do it in her own time.  She’s an independent little one…

Hey, I’m up at TopMomma.com again so if you could click here and vote for me, that would be great!  Keep me up there as long as you can! You can click the link above as much as you’d like and when you get to TopMomma.com, give The Tater Tot a click too.  It’ll take you back here where you can read or shop to your heart’s content!  The pic to click is the same one as the last pic in my header…the one where The Tot looks like “Huh?”

So, Go, Go, Go!  But come back, okay?

I came across this gift bag today at GoToBaby.com that would be great for a baby shower or baby up to 12 months old!  You can personalize not only the tote bag with the baby’s initial but also the items in the bag.  It comes with nice, thick burp cloths trimmed with ribbon, a beautiful sweater, a soft and cozy blanket, and a baby bath robe.  And, it’s on sale! 

It’s funny the things that you take for granted.  When I can vacuum, I don’t particularly want to but now that I can’t, I would like to vacuum almost more than anything.  Why can’t I vacuum?  Princess Tater Tot does not like the vacuum.  Okay, that is the understatement of the year.  She loathes the vacuum.   I try to vacuum and she screams and cries like her life depends on it.  It’s actually quite scary and disturbing to see.  I experimented the other day with putting her in her high chair with a tasty snack while I vacuumed thinking that, since food is one of her favorite things in the world, she would be distracted enough to let me vacuum.  Oh Good Lord was I wrong!  It took 10 minutes after the vacuum was off to calm her down!  It took picking her up out of her high chair, swaying and humming, looking at all of the pictures of Mommy and Daddy, and The Grandmas and Grandpas, and the Princess Tater Tot calendar to get her back to her Happy Place.  Needless to say, I won’t be experimenting with that again any time soon. 

My instinct was to expose her gradually to it and let her cry a little but continue to expose her so she gets used to it.  “A little” was not anywhere close to how much she was crying so I’m thinking we need to go back to our current arrangement: let the dog hair build up until The Mommy absolutely can’t stand it anymore (or until we can make a life-sized dog out of the hair on the carpet), then have either The Mommy or The Daddy take The Tot out on a walk while the other one vacuums.  Strange, but it’s what’s working for now.  Somebody please tell me she’ll grow out of this soon!

I have finally found foods that Princess Tater Tot won’t eat.  I never thought this day would come because she has previously eaten whatever I put in front of her.  Sometimes with a funny face but she will then eat it until she ends up liking it.  “Fake it ’til you make it”, if you will.  Well, not so with yogurt and avocado.  Not together, mind you.  I have tried avocado alone, avocado with cream cheese and tomato (a dip recipe I found in Superfoods: For Babies and Children), guacamole.  Hey, wait a minute!  The other day when The Grandma came to take us out to lunch, Tater Tot ate the avocado in The Grandma’s salad!  I guess it’s just the avocados that The Mommy tries to get her to eat.  Hm.  But she still won’t eat yogurt.  I’ve tried yogurt with apples and pears, yogurt with cinnamon, yogurt with plums (her absolute favorite fruit) and she’s still not liking it.  In fact, I’m wasting lots and lots of yogurt and energy concocting these lovely dishes and she takes two reluctant bites then shuts her mouth until I give her something different.  She’s even starting to make faces at the oatmeal I make for breakfast.  I don’t know why I’m surprised that she’s developing tastes of her own.  Isn’t that her job as a little person? 

Princess Tater Tot had her one year check-up today at the pediatrician’s.  She’s growing like a weed and at the 70th and 75th percentile for height and weight.  Whoda’ thunkit?  Of course, along with the Well Child visit comes the immunizations, if you should choose to do so.  I never really thought twice about immunizing her.  I guess I really never knew it could be an issue until after I had already started immunizing her and she didn’t have any bad reactions so I continued. 

Today she got four shots.  And she screamed.  A lot.  Poor kid.  Mr. Duckie didn’t help like I thought he would.  Who knew?  Mr. Duckie is a stuffed duck (duh!) that is almost as big as she is and she loves him!  I thought that was our ticket today.  But I was wrong.  She knew as soon as we stepped into the examination room and started crying.  She’s at the age where she’s scared of everything so even things like laying down on the scale to get weighed make her scream.  So does the crinkly paper on the exam table.  And getting undressed on the crinkly exam table paper.  So actually laying down on the crinkly paper, having a nurse hold her legs while she poked her four times was a bit traumatic.  I have to give props to the nurse, though.  She is really good with Tater Tot and very understanding of parents who are more traumatized by the shots than the children are!  The thing about The Tot is that she bounces back pretty quickly.  She wants to be happy.  She looks for reasons to be happy.  And usually some hugs from The Mommy are all it takes for her to get back on the Happy Train. So we hugged and hummed and looked at the Disney characters on the walls until all was right with the world again.  If I didn’t think immunizing her was the right thing to do, it could be very easy to justify not immunizing her because of her reaction.  It’s not easy to see her that upset.  But she gets over it and we get on with it.

Her new thing now is walking behind her ride-on walker.  Until the day before yesterday, she had no interest in doing this but yesterday, she decided she was interested.  So she walks.  And walks.  Before I know it, she’s going to be running me ragged all over the house.  Hey, at least it’s exercise!  There’s a positive spin, huh?