She’s 8 weeks old! 4 more weeks until I head back to work and I could not be more thrilled. My brain is an absolute puddle of mush and I am craving consistent grown up interaction in the worst way. It’s definitely going to be hard to be away from my little crab but we desperately need something to break up the monotony of our current life. It’s gotten especially bad since baby’s little medical scare because since we got home from the hospital I have stopped being productive in any capacity and mostly just stare at her all day long. This is not conducive to maintaining a clean and orderly household. Or should I say initiating, because let’s be honest, there is nothing to maintain because I am a terrible housewife. I have this idea in my head that when I go back to work and we settle into our new routine that then I will be more likely to stay on top of laundry, groceries, and other household chores – but I have a feeling that this is a sad fantasy and in all actuality we will exist exactly as we currently are, with the addition of a fat check for daycare being doled out every week. Regardless, I miss my patients, I miss my coworkers, and I miss doing something other than diapers, boobs, and babbling.

Speaking of her medical scare – UGH. I debated writing about the little situation that happened to beeb because it literally makes me sick to my stomach to think about, but a part of me wants something other than medical records (and bills) to help us remember some of the details of our whole experience so we can someday tell this kid how much trouble she was when she was just a teeny thing. So here it is:

OG Scares the Hell out of Us and Earns a Stay in the Hospital, and it was The Absolute Worst

If you are a parent, I know you’ve done it. Even though you knew you were being paranoid and silly, you at some point checked to make sure your kid was breathing – watching for their chest to rise and fall, putting your hand by their nose to feel for hot breath going in and out, listened for their little snuffles and snorts to ensure they were indeed alive. And after you were reassured by these things, you would shake your head and tease yourself for being such a worrywart, and laugh at your silliness – but then a few minutes/hours/days later – I bet you did the same thing again. That was (and still is) us – especially with little one being such a spitty puker, always choking and coughing up crap, getting it stuck in her throat and having it shoot out her nose – of course we worried about her – but she would always settle herself out and then gasp for air and cry and eventually get back to normal. Well one night around 3 am, I woke up to a strange little sound, and I glanced over at miss octopus and I instantly knew something was wrong – her body was shaking, and after that strange sound, she didn’t make any other noises. I picked her up and her body was as stiff as a board and convulsing, and I realized she wasn’t breathing at all, and she was foaming at the mouth. I started shaking her, and yelling for Gates to wake up, and eventually smacking her, and yelling for her to BREATHE, and eventually after what felt like an eternity, she did start breathing – a slow, shallow, growly type breathing that was obviously not normal. We threw our jackets over our pajamas and headed to the ER. Earlier that week I had reached an important parental milestone of sitting in the front passenger seat again next to Gates and not in the backseat with the baby being a weirdo helicopter parent, but obviously in our current emergent state I had to sit next to her – in fact I sat practically on top of her during our ride to the hospital. (And in all honesty I have not yet recovered from that regression again yet, but I hope to be sitting up front with my husband again and not in the backseat with the kid sometime before the baby goes to college). Of course in our time of need the biggest snow storm of the winter had started, and we also hit every red light possible on the way there – but OG fell asleep in the car and I obsessively monitored her breathing the entire way to Children’s.

I don’t want to spend too much time bitching about our experience there, because that is not productive and also not worth dwelling on – but as someone who knows a few things about being a pediatric provider, I can just say that I was not thrilled with how squid’s care was handled. The trouble started with 11 tries before they got an IV in our poor, screaming little babe. ELEVEN. I know babies can be hard sticks, but this facility routinely puts IVs in premature infants. There is no excuse for it taking 2 hours, 6 people, and 11 pokes before they were able to get a line in a fat 9 pounder. I won’t get into the other BS that happened while we were at the ER, but after a long chat with the provider and reaching an agreement that tests looked reassuring and what happened with her was probably just a random event with no medically explainable cause and we would be heading home soon – suddenly someone was in front of us telling us that our bed upstairs was ready. Surprise admission! Gates quickly left on a mission to get us necessities from home (like my breast pump), and to arrange daycare for the dog, and I began starring in my new role of Bitchy Mom with a Medical Background aka hospital staff’s worst nightmare. Throughout our stay, nobody explained anything to us, nobody offered test results to us, none of the many doctors, residents, specialists, nurses, etc, seemed to have shared any information at all with eacho ther, meaning that we had to fill them in on the history that had already been taken multiple times, or to explain tests that had already been done and conclusions that had already been made… it was truly infuriating, and for anyone who knows me it takes a lot to get me to the point of that emotion.

Throughout our experience I just kept coming back to the realization that hospitalizations must be insanely confusing, scary, and frustrating for anyone who hasn’t spent any time in a medical environment, and even more so as a parent of a hospitalized child. If I hadn’t been such a demanding nightmare about our care, our stay would have been much longer than it was. We also had the blessing of being there for a reason that was, while terrifying in the moment it occurred, likely isolated and benign… meaning – our hospitalized child was pretty happy, healthy, and thriving. Spending a few days on a pediatric neurology unit a few weeks before Christmas was incredibly humbling to say the least, and I am still grateful that our little peanut didn’t have to have her stocking hung up surrounded by wires and monitors and IVs. The conclusion is -all results were normal and what they think happened to OG is something called an apparent life threatening event, or ALTE, and can be read about here: http://www.merckmanuals.com/home/children-s-health-issues/miscellaneous-disorders-in-infants-and-young-children/apparent-life-threatening-event-alte

Heading home from our stay with a medically cleared baby was one of the best moments of my life.

Also – for anyone who I encountered in the Children’s ER, radiology department, or neurology floor during our stay – I am very sorry for being an incredible, aggressive, protective, crazy bitch. Although one of the nurses there said I wasn’t being a bitch, I was just being an advocate for my child. So let’s go with that.

We made the rounds for the holidays, the annual Chrismukkah celebration with the Gates family was of course a blast, and then we went to Rapids to spend a few days with  my family. OG was spoiled beyond belief with gifts and love (as were we), and we even got to dump babe with my parents overnight while we got some uninterrupted snoozes… couldn’t have asked for a better holiday. The octopus’s gift to us was Christmas morning she found her voice and started talking to us… and hasn’t shut up since.

Then we got to enjoy 2 more of the best days of the year: New Year’s Eve with my bestie Megan and her family enjoying fondue and all sorts of disgusting amounts of deliciousness, and then New Year’s Day with them as well at their annual Soup Day – basically we eat many soups and it is the best. Olivia got loved on by Megan’s family, and Gates and I got fat. Always awesome.

We head into the new year chubby and grateful, and I find myself temporarily filled more with patience and love than my usual stuffing of snark and sass. As both of Gates and my families deal with some loss and some medical issues it makes us even more appreciative that our little family of three has health, happiness, and a fridge full of beer and cheese. And this chubby, awesome, always covered in spit up squid is screeching and thriving and a constant reminder of love and new beginnings for all of us.

But also a reminder that it’s ok to make this face sometimes. Because life is hard.

And also this face. Because life is sometimes bullshit.