Wine Please

Cooper’s fever broke sometime during Tuesday night.  He had no fever Wednesday, but I still brought him in to get his blood work done.  I pulled him out of the car and his arms had a pink rash on it.  I figured it was heat rash because it was warm in the car and he had dozed off with his arms partly tucked under him.  We went in the building and after a good 20 minutes or so, the rash faded a bit.  We did his blood draw and he did very well:  he cried, but no carrying-on or screaming or trying to get at the line in his arm.  The other phlebotomist played peek-a-boo with him while I snuggled him and tried to divert his attention.  The phlebotomist who was doing the blood draw was really good:  was very gentle, tied the tourniquet firmly but without pinching him, got a vein quickly and easily, and kept making little jokes like “yep, keep looking at her so that you think of her when you get this boo-boo” or “oh, you’re mommy’s cowboy? (his bib made that proclamation) I love cowboys and country music.  We’d be a great fit!”  Once she was finished and he finished whimpering, he went back to flirting with both phlebotomists, and even waved bye-bye at them while flashing a huge grin.

We got home, grabbed Maggie and ran to PetsMart to trim her nails and pick up cat food.  We get in the store and the rash is bright pink again, but during the time we sat in the cool store, it faded again.  This morning, Cooper had no sign of a rash so I brought him to school.  By the time we got there and I set him on the floor with the toys, his rash had made a bit of a return…but again, he’d been in the car in the sun on our drive in.  I didn’t say anything since it still seemed like heat rash.  Well, I get a call late in the afternoon, shortly before I leave for work and they noticed the rash on his arms and his legs.  What?  Legs?  I leave a message for my mom on my way to pick up Gavin and Cooper.

I get him home and I check him over…yep, the rash is contained to just his legs and arms…maybe a little on his neck (although it might’ve been irritation from the tag…who knows!).  We have dinner, Cooper tries elbow noodles (he was VERY excited by them…lots of groovin’ in his chair about them…wish I got it on video).  We put the kids to bed and my mom (she’s a nurse) calls back and suggests that Cooper might have roseola.  I looked it up and from everything Mr. Google was able to offer, I think that might be our rash!  But just to make sure, I checked on Fifth Diseaseand, since he’s not old enough to vaccinated, the Measles and German Measles.  Those don’t seem to fit…I think our winner is roseola.

Now, after all those fun pictures of rashes, who’s got the heebie-jeebies?

I know I just had a jewelry sale last week, but after LaskiGal From the Cheap Seats gave me the heads-up to this Bloggy Giveaway Carnival, I just had to do it! In fact, I’m going to get really crazy! I’m not going to give away just one set of jewelry, but TWO SETS OF GENUINE COOKIE LEE JEWERLY!!!! One gold, one silver; each worth at least $50! If you’re interested, please leave me a comment on this article BEFORE 11:59pm on Sunday night (4/27) and mention whether you’d like the gold or the silver. I will use a random generator to choose the winners.

(click to see enlarged view)

The silver necklace, earrings, and bracelet set is silver with genuine pink shell and pink crystals. The earrings are eurowires…very comfy to wear, yet don’t fall out like traditional french wires. The necklace is 15-18″ adjustable, and the bracelet is a stretchy bracelet. The pink is actually a bit lighter than what is shown in the picture…what can I say, I haven’t finished replacing all my incandescents with flourescents yet.

The gold necklace, earrings, and bracelet set is gold with Parisian-influenced beads of different romantic colors. The larger beads have tiny painted flowers inside. The necklace is the Y-shaped lariat style, with tiny beads along the top and larger beads on the hang-down. It is 15-18″ adjustable. The earrings are post earrings with teardrop beads, and the bracelet closes with a lobster-claw clasp (making it fully adjustable for your wrist-size).

Meanwhile, I still have those April and May jewelry specials going on…so feel free to check out my business site and email me at jewelry@colleenrummel.com with your order. Don’t forget Mother’s Day is just around the corner…get something for your mom, your mother-in-law, another mom in your life, or for yourself!

Thanks for looking and good luck to all of you…be sure to check out the other giveaways listed at The Bloggy Giveaway!

Monday evening when I picked up Cooper from school, he felt a little warm.  I thought, “well, it’s warm in the building today, so I’ll not worry about it till we get home.”  We get home and as I’m pulling him out of the car, he still feels really warm.  I have Justin feel his head (I’m perpetually cold, so I just wanted to be sure before I violated him with a thermometer), and he agreed.  So we check his temp and it’s 100.6 degrees.  Great.  Since I have been home with him about 99.98% of the times he was sick since starting daycare, I asked Justin to stay with him if he was still running a fever in the morning.

Tuesday morning, Justin gives Cooper his sippy cup of formula and changes him and proclaims him “hot.”  I come in, touch him, proclaim him “hot”, then commence with the violating again^*.  100.8 degrees at 8am.  We all know what that means!  No daycare and staying home with Daddy.  I give Justin a few pointers before I leave (i.e. don’t expect to get anything done because he will become Velcro-Klingon-Baby; violate check his temp again in about 5 hours after Tylenol wears off; lots of water and formula; he gets worse or he’s messing with his ears, call the pediatrician).  Normally we wait a good 3 days of fever before we call the pediatrician (unless it’s like 103 range…that just freaks me out a bit), but this is his second bout of fever in less than two weeks and so I’m feeling a little unnerved by it…especially since he was just there a week ago for his 9-month check-up (oh, dude!  I forgot to report that our little porker is 20lbs, 6oz, and is 28.25 inches…not as big as some other babies, but big for us!).

So I go to work and Justin calls me no less than 8 times.  No joke (although maybe slight exaggeration).  One of those calls, though, he mentioned that Cooper was messing with his ear, so he called the pediatrician, got an appointment, and had fun with Velcro-Klingon-Baby and his Fever of Steel.  Even with Tylenol, it stayed over 100 degrees.  At about 2pm, Cooper’s temp had shot to 102.6 degrees, which made me glad I wasn’t home because that’s when I start getting a little nervous (yes, yes, I know babies and kids can handle high fevers, but for some reason 102.6 gives me aggida). Justin gives him some Motrin, and yet, his Fever of Steel kick’s Motrin’s butt and stays above 100 degrees over an hour later.

Justin and Cooper go to the appointment.  We get the dreaded response of “everything’s fine…must be viral.  Wait it out.  If he’s not better by Saturday, then come back in.”  When Justin reported back with that info, my brain immediately said,”What?!?  Saturday?  Is this woman going to come stay with my child so that we can go to work if he decides to hold onto this high fever?  Whatever.  If that child still has this high fever by Thursday, I am calling and insisting on seeing his pediatrician, not this nurse practitioner that only does the occasional sick-visit.  Crazy!  How does she expect me to pay them if I’m not working?”  I’m sure a lot of you have had similar things go through your head.  Or maybe it’s just me because I am wound up tighter than a drum.  Then Justin dumps additional info on me:  this woman was also concerned about this itty-bitty tiny dot on Cooper’s face (what I thought was either a scratch in its healing stages or one that turned into a tiny red scar…I have one or two myself).  I guess she found like 3 total on his face and wants all this blood work to check for low platelets.  At first I said, “have fun!” since I have done 99.98% of all medical visits with both children, including blood-work for Gavin (at least 3 times) and X-rays (that child did not believe me when I said they were taking a picture), not to mention all the shots, etc.  Justin gets to the lab and they’re closed.  At 4:15pm.  WTH?  Now I have to take him?

I get home and grill poor Justin about exactly what the nurse practitioner said, trying to understand how a dot or two on our baby’s face could warrant extensive lab work (appears they are requesting 4-5 vials of blood).  I get up this morning and call the nurse line and wait and wait and wait for someone to call me back (heaven forbid I ever get to actually talk to someone when I call like I do with my GP or OB-Gyn…but I digress).  The nurse calls me back and explained that what the CNP saw was petechiae and that warranted all the blood work.  I kept asking, “but what are you looking for?  what are you trying to rule out?” and it just seemed that her answers weren’t quite getting into my skull.  So I thanked her, hung up, checked Cooper’s temp (97.9!) and put him down for his nap.  Then I went and looked up “petechial” because when she first said “petechia” my brain automatically went into CSI, Law and Order, Crossing Jordan, Forensic Files, and every other Crime Drama and True Crime show I watch (OMG I watch waaaay too many of them, apparently).  Thankfully, Wikipedia was able to calm my nerves…slightly.  For a lot of you, “petechial” makes you think “petechial hemorrhaging”, like what they see in the eyes of someone who was strangled or something like that…that’s what it did for me, at least.  So to see that it can be caused also by coughing, crying, or vomiting, etc., made me feel a bit better because that kid has had a cold with a cough, he’s puked (from coughing-till-he-gagged), and he cries a lot.  He’s fussy and high-maintenance.  And he usually throws a fit about being put on the floor with his toys when he wants to be walked around instead.  But then I read about the low platelet count (thrombocytopenia) and while most of the diseases and illnesses didn’t mean much to me, or seemed awful extreme, leukemia jumped out of the list and slapped me in the face.  No, really, I swear it did.  Or at least I think it did.  Since one of my best friends in elementary school died after a long battle with leukemia, it kinda freaked me out.  Kinda hit the panic button for me.  I’m not going to search on leukemia and its early symptoms so that I can get my heart rate back where it belongs, and so I can focus on work, and having some lunch (or not losing it).  We’ll see how long that lasts.

* I cannot, for the life of me, get those darn ear thermometers to work right…even on me…so I have no choice but to use the old rectal thermometer.

The Washington Capitals are tied with the Philadelphia Flyers three games each in the Stanley Cup Quarterfinals. Tonight is Game 7 in DC…where we meet for the last time. 

Come on, Caps!  Beat those Philadelphia Fryers!  Send them home to their mamas!

Apparently about 1.3 inches of rainfall is too much for Comcast because our internet was down most of the day (read: playing catch-up on blog-reading/commenting). Actually, 1.3 inches is pushing it, since that is what the approximate rainfall total is as of 9:30pm…it was probably only at 0.5-0.75 inches at the point the service went down earlier today. Losers. Can you tell I don’t like them? I can’t wait for FiOS to come…obviously Justin and I are nearly foaming at the mouth, waiting for service to be extended to our area. But even for those folks who are too stupid, short-sighted, gluttons for poor internet service and worse customer service, excited to have their rates raised every month, not interested in changing providers should theoretically see a reduction in their rates (or at least a slow-down in the crazy rate hikes). Competition for consumer services is always a good thing.

Since Earth Day is in a few days, folks have been getting all “green” and the cable networks have “green” programming, and there’s ads with a representative from the Left and the Right talking about how they’re coming together for the Earth (my fave is the Al Sharpton/Pat Robertson pairing…goes back to my Religious Studies background, I guess). I recycle…in fact, I force Justin to recycle (although he likes to vex me with tossing stuff in the trash). We’re lucky that our area recycles nearly everything and it gets picked up on trash day. What’s killing me is the conversion from incandescents to fluorescents. I am soooooooo cheap that it is hard to want to pull out a working bulb and replace it with a fluorescent. I went and bought a bunch of the compact fluorescents when they were on sale for the multi-packs, so in the next few days I will be replacing working bulbs (inner monologue: I can do it, I can do it, I can do it). Maybe I’ll just have Justin remove the working bulbs so that all I’m doing is putting a new bulb where we’re missing one. But that’s not my biggest problem…my biggest problem is that we have at least 7 “builders special” lighting fixtures that each contain three decorator bulbs with the tiny candelabra bases (I didn’t build this house so I refuse to take responsibility for those brass atrocities). Each of those bulbs costs $9. Each light fixture will cost $27 to replace the bulbs…times six equates to about $189 (before tax…add like $9.49 more!). Really, people..that’s just crazy! So in light of my resistance to invest an obscene amount into lights I don’t particularly care for, I’m now on the hunt for replacement fixtures that have standard bases. It seems the only light fixtures with chrome/nickel/silver tone that are below $30 are either the ones you find in your grandma’s bathroom, or those fixtures that look like nipples. I just can’t put nipples up on my ceilings. I already have a complex about my magical shrinking breasts…I don’t need large breasts taunting me from above. Does anyone have any reasonably-priced flushmount fixtures with a silver tone from this millenium that will not give me mammary nightmares?

As I’ve mentioned, Justin has been working out for a good 4 or 6 weeks. I’m very proud of him…it’s not easy getting up close to 2 hours earlier than normal to go work out, or to turn away favorite foods, and eat those funky protein bars. Despite all that, he’s been doing well and chugging along, and the results have shown on his body and on the scale. What has been driving me crazy is the friggin’ abandoned water bottles (usually in some state of not-quite-empty) ALL over the house. I tend to leave them because I figure he’ll come back to it. But by the end of the day, I’ll often find several all over the house. Since it’s late, I usually dump them in the plant (can’t make myself dump it in the sink), and leave them on the counter above the kitchen trash can (my recycling staging area). By morning, they are gone, and each time I naively think hope he put them in the recycling bin on his way out. Nope! I pop open the kitchen trash and there they are! It makes me crazy to pick them up; it makes me crazy to dump out the undrunk water; it make me crazy to dig them out of the smelly trash (often from under the old coffee grounds) to put them in the recycling! Crazy. REALLY CRAZY! Like I’m-gritting-my-teeth-typing-about-it-now kind of crazy. And know what? His parents recycle…like really really REALLY recycle…like break-down-the-cereal-boxes-and-toss-in-the-toilet-paper-rolls kind of recycling. HARD CORE! His mom has composted eligible food garbage as long as I’ve known her…yet her own flesh-and-blood can’t put his twelve-hundred-bazillion partially-drank water bottles into the well-marked recycle bin. OMG, people, we don’t even have to separate our recyclables…nope…just toss them all in and they’re separated at the center. Maybe I should go all Ed Begley on him for a week or two so that when I go back to normal, he’ll be so relieved that he’ll comply. And before you ask, I did buy him a reusable water bottle, especially since most bottled water lacks fluoride and doesn’t have the same standards imposed on it as drinking water. He refuses to use it. Says it’s easier to grab a bottle out of the fridge; he refills the bottle a few times during the day (so has 1 bottle of bottled water and like 3 bottles of filtered tap water). But I think he refuses to use the reusable bottle just so he can watch my head explode each morning.

Know what else? PMS is a bitch (as I sit panting in the corner like Animal from all my ranting).