Bound and Determined

Alright...I admit it, now that you called me on it.

Yes...the first drawing DOES have a blue floor line.

And that is because I don't believe in throwing away perfectly good paper (except for those moments when I feel like torturing Jeremy, and I sneak bits of cardboard into the trash, and watch with perverse delight as he fishes them out and puts them into the recycling bin).

And I was just far too tired to walk over to the counter and get my blue pen, and decided to use the black one in my drawer instead.

Normally, the OC disordered person in me would have shunned the piece of paper with the blue line as it didn't match the black, but today I'm taking baby steps out of my OCD-ness, and have allowed you to see a flaw in my brain function.

Anyway, back to what I was going to talk about.

A few days ago, Eden started to get a fever.

"No sweat!" the veteran mom in my head said to me, and I pulled out the big guns (read: acetaminophen and a cool, wet rag), and went to work.

No dice.

Her fever just kept getting worse.

Like the smart mom I am, I decided that I should probably take my sick baby to Costco, and simultaneously switch her supplemented meals to a foreign, foul-smelling formula, and naively expected that rainbows would shoot forth from her tiny heart.

Now, cut me a little slack. I was really tired.

Eden hadn't slept well the night before, and I was on Crazy-Irrational-but-Functional-Mom mode.

I won't go into the nitty-gritty, but let's just say that she was less than delighted with my choices on her behalf.

Jeremy mutated into the Overly-Anxious-and-Paranoid-Father (it's a beautiful thing), and we decided to take her to the doctor Friday night (I seriously think that doctors just guess 99% of the time...just sayin'...).

There was really nothing they could do for her, since she had a virus, so we went home.

On Sunday she surprised us by turning a sickly-pink color from head to toe, and shook it up by having spots the same color scattered across her body.

My first thought was chicken pox, and my heart sank, for two reasons. One, she's been vaccinated (I think) for that, and two, I've never had it, so not only would my poor baby suffer, but I would be incapacitated.

So we googled it, and it wasn't chicken pox.

Whew.

We basically had no clue, and the new after-hours doctor wasn't going to be in her office until 3PM (what kind of on-call doctor is unavailable at noon?), and so we would have to sweat it out.

Luckily for me, Emily came up with the most likely explanation: Roseolea.

All her symptoms matched, and so we decided to just wait it out, and not see the doctor since they hadn't done anything when we went in, and probably wouldn't be able to do anything for her, unless she was bleeding from some orifice, or her eyeballs popped out, or she evolved into a toad or something.

Next morning, she was normal-colored again, but super crabby.

She basically spent the entire time she was sick in a dazed stupor, or half-sleeping in my arms.

She made up for it today.

She woke up, and was happy to crawl around, and then got cranky so I put her down for a nap after she'd been awake for about two hours. So, basically she woke up at 9:30 (lucky me!) and kept muttering/crying until about an hour ago.

I kept going in there, trying to figure out what her deal was, and figured it was because she had slept for almost 72 hours straight.

And then I remembered...

Normally, Eden likes to be swaddled, and I hadn't done it while she was sick because she was a floppy bag of dough, and didn't need much inducement to go to sleep while she was under the weather.
Odd, yes, for an almost nine-month-old, especially since she just pulls her arms out when I lay her down anyway.

But, she's got a good dose of her mother's OCD, and wanted to be wrapped up, by-dang-it-golly-yo-shizzle, and wasn't going to go to sleep until I did it right.

So, I wrapped her up, popped her suck-suck toy in her mouth, and left the room.

Silence.

I guess we all like normalcy.

Even when we're one day shy of nine months.