Dad's Eye View

Today while I was at work wrapping up a meeting my wife calls me. Normally I would have called her back, but there were a couple of side conversations going so I quietly answered it. Turns out that little girl had a fever of 103.6. Now, I don’t know a whole lot about the ins and outs of baby health, but I know enough to know that anything approaching 104 is not cool at all (pun intended).

Since it was lunchtime, and Karen sounded pretty distressed, I drove home to see if I could help stand around and look concerned. Karen had arranged an appointment with the pediatrician at 1:45, so I was pretty much just going home to see if there was anything I could help with until then.

Courtney felt like a hot potato as I held her while Karen took a shower and got ready for the doctor visit. I headed back to work when they departed for the doctor appointment.

A while later I got a text message from Karen telling me to pack up and meet her at Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital. It’s not really the sort of message you want to get, ever. It turns out that her white blood cell count was over 20,000 and the pediatrician wanted to get some tests run over at the hospital. Apparently, this is a different illness than what she started with 10 days ago.

I have to say that it’s a really horrible experience watching your little girl get blood drawn. To make matters worse, the nurse had a difficult time finding a vein. The first needle had no luck finding blood even though she repositioned it several times after it had already pierced the skin (OUCH!). She looked for a vein in the other arm and couldn’t find any so went back to the first arm. Luckily, the second needle provided what they needed.

The vampire is evil

After the hospital, Karen took Courtney back over to the pediatrician’s for a shot of antibiotics. We won’t know what the tests yielded until tomorrow during our followup visit at the pediatrician. So we’ll keep our fingers crossed for good news.

Our little girl is such an incredible angel, that even while she’s sick she sat very quietly for several hours waiting for the tests to begin. She really is the cutest baby ever!

Up until about 18 months ago, I was pretty sure that I would make it through life without ever experiencing a diaper change, let alone actually performing one. But I’m sort of a modern man in at least some respects. I believe in taking an active role in our daughter’s life and sharing the workload when I’m around. So here I am after  9 months of pregnancy and anticipation, and 9 months of truly incredible time getting to know our little girl, and Lord only knows how many diaper changes under my belt. I had almost considered myself somewhat of an expert. Until now.

We’ve had a few very minor rashes along our journey. But a little dab of Bubba’s Butt Paste or the like would clear it right up. I even began to believe that all this talk about diaper rashes from people was just a bunch of embellished stories. Not unlike the “record” fish that jumped off the line just before entering the boat. Now I understand.

I do the nighttime routine – bath, books and bed. So the other day when I was getting her out of her clothes for bath I was a bit taken aback by what has scarred my retinas. She was clearly not very happy about any sort of diaper change. And I can’t blame her. Nothing but blistering red everywhere! My poor little girl looked miserable!

Now, keeping in mind that I grew up in the South (feel free to add whatever accent you’re thinking about), let me just say that I don’t know nothing about no vajajays! I knew I was out matched on this one and called in the big guns – MAMA COME QUICK! Thank goodness my wife handles things like this so well. I would have been at the ER without any assistance.

BTW, I don’t have a southern accent at all, so don’t you feel silly for using it! Actually, I’ve been accused of being from Canada more often than not. Which I find rather odd, eh.

Now that it’s been a couple of days and my wife has polled Facebook and all kinds of other places, we’ve implemented a few remedies and she’s definitely on the mend. We tried the various butt pastes with added cornstarch and we weren’t making much headway. Then today Karen tried Lotrimin and things would appear to be improving markedly. I could see a big difference in just a day, and my retinas are thankful.

After a week of being sick with her first cold and the follow-on diaper rash, my little girl could certainly use a break! So with any luck tomorrow she’ll be completely perfect again and ready to keep winning hearts of everybody she encounters.

It would appear that we’re on the cusp of getting our precious little angel back. Today is the first day this week where she wasn’t just absolutely pitiful with her cold. She played and smiled and was generally back to her very engaging self. There was only one hiccup. She coughed a lot last night, so I don’t think she slept very well. It showed around lunchtime when she was extremely cranky. After a good hour and a half of solid nap time though she was happy happy.

We’re hoping for a really good night of sleep for her tonight. With any luck, she’ll wake up and resume her role of the happiest baby ever! She didn’t even cry when I put her down in the crib for nighty night. She’s pretty much screamed every time since we got back from our vacation to New Hampshire a few weeks ago. So a nice mellow transition to bed is a welcome return.

I at least got to leave the house all week for work, but my wife has been pretty much stuck here all week waiting for girl to get better. I like to get out of the house at least once a week for dinner, so even I’m starting to get excited about the prospect of getting out of the house as a family. If nothing else, it’d be nice to take advantage just a little bit of the long weekend to have some fun outside of the living room. Now, if only the weather would cooperate and turn nice and sunny!

Well, we made it 9 months and 11 days, but our little girl finally found her kryptonite. She appears to have contracted her first real cold. Up until now she’s never even had a runny nose.

Talk about feeling like a bad parent… We’ve been working on maintaining the sleep schedule, so we’ve made an effort to not go into the nursery during the night if at all possible. We even had to let her cry it out a few times. Our efforts have paid off for the most part, as she has been sleeping through the night very regularly. Last night, however, she was whining for quite a while off and on. I finally went in there and she had snot running down her nose and a fever and looked absolutely pitiful.

In retrospect, she had a different, more whiny cry than her normal “let me out of here” cry. Of course, since she’s never been sick we didn’t really pick up on that. At least we should be better prepared for the next time. In the meanwhile, I don’t think there’s going to be much sleeping going on in the house until she gets back to her normal, incredibly happy self.

Speaking of sleep… Good night.