Merry Christmas!

We hope you all had as lovely a Christmas as we did. Jeff's dad was here for the weekend and left Monday morning. Leo really enjoyed playing and reading with his Granddad and had a great time opening presents with him.














Leo helped decorate the tree and wanted to "play presents" in the days leading up to today.













"Lots of presents" was heard often.











Opening presents is fun!

I did it!

Those are very common words for Leo right now, along with "Right there," "There it is," "That way," "I don't want it," and pretty much anything we say, as parroting really frequent at the moment.

"I did it" ranges from anything as simple as getting food onto his fork as building a block tower. Another "I did it" is the fact that I finally gave in and cut Leo's hair. I couldn't bear the thought of taking him to a barber or salon and having them cut all of the curl off, so I did it myself. Luckily for me his hair is crazy enough that it looks ok even though it's not perfect.



Leo before haircut.















Leo after haircut (kinda hard to tell, I know).











We also got some snow last week, once just a few inches (pictured here), and another day with about 5 inches--it's all melted now (no white Christmas), but we had fun while it lasted.

Diagnosis

Leo and I stayed home yesterday and made another trip to the pediatrician, since his temp was 103.6 first thing in the morning. They diagnosed an ear infection which obviously was brewing all weekend but not evident when the pediatrician looked on Saturday. After the first dose of antibiotics Leo was already back to his old cheerful self (well, except when it came time to get up and dressed this morning--we were so late getting going that I had to take him to daycare so Jeff wouldn't be late for work).

Here are some pics from our day home yesterday:

ick.

Kirstin went to Chicago for Friday & Saturday nights to visit our friend Robin. Friday night started off fine, as Leo and I dropped her at the train station and then went to the 2nd half of Centennial High School's JV basketball game against Mattoon. Then we got home....

Leo started running a fever that night, which semi-peaked at around 102 then. He came back to my room, because I didn't want to try to deal with getting him back to sleep on his own. (I was more or less braced for the idea of him ending up in my bed, as it usually seems to happen the first night around anytime that Kirstin's out of town for a conference.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, we went to the convenient care clinic on Saturday morning. The ears checked out fine, the lungs checked out fine, the oxygen level in the blood checked out fine. The doc swabbed his throat for strep, and the rapid strep test (96% accurate) checked out negative, too. He screamed about a dose of ibuprofen at the clinic, but creative application of an ear-flushing syringe got it down him without too much incident. (He was used as a demonstration for the nurses on duty about how to accomplish this.)

His fever had hit the 102 mark again later in the afternoon, but he was kicking and screaming about taking a dose of medicine. He screamed so much, in fact, that he gagged on it and ended up puking things back up. (This is the only such colorful remark in the entire post.)

He slept without much incident until about 11:00, at which point his fever had hit 104+. I first woke Kirstin up in Chicago, debating whether to go straight to the ER. We ended up with a call to the advice nurse, who suggested a bath. This was only accomplished because I got in the tub with him, and even then only got his legs wet. In the end, I was up doing the cool washcloth on the forehead thing until about 1:00. He, perhaps not obviously, slept through much of that last hour. Then I got about 3 hours of sleep (effectively for the first time all night).

His fever had crept back up by 4:00, so we went through another round of the washcloth thing, and I managed to get back under the covers around 5:15. He then slept until about 7:45. (Because I didn't fall asleep until sometime after 6 on this go-around, that makes somewhere around 4.5 hours of sleep, for those keeping count.)

The weather has been a mix of freezing rain and sleet on and off all day, so that was icky, too.

Kirstin got home around noon, and I got about a half-hour catnap during Leo's nap. I woke up before he did, but that was mostly because I didn't really fall asleep.

We're glad that Robin (who's an ER doc) came back down with Kirstin, because it took some of her tricks to get a dose of Tylenol back down him after his fever came up and peaked at 104.6. That really did start to bring the fever back down, and he does seem to have started to get back to his normal self.

The two upsides: Leo saw his first movie (Finding Nemo), and I finished my library book (White Night). [Side note: I'm geeked out a little because the Urbana Free Library now has Small Favor listed in its public access catalog, and it doesn't even come out until April. I'm number 2 on the reserve list, and seriously excited.]

I'm not ready to go through this again any time soon.

Not too much new

Not really too much new around here, but wanted to share some pictures from the last few weeks.


Leo trying out Aunt LL's funky boots.


















Aunt LL and Leo reading--Leo took full advantage of the extra people around over Thanksgiving to get lots of extra stories. He also hit up everyone to play blocks and puzzles with him--LL and Shannon were great block builders and Grandpa Ervin was a good puzzle partner.










Mmmmmm, Thanksgiving chow.












College is going to cost how much by the time I'm eighteen?!?!?!











Leo got his hat and both mittens on all by himself and then tried to get his shoes on too. And yet most mornings it's a struggle to get him into his coat. Sigh.