Baby got sick last Saturday in the car. Nothing worse than a baby throwing up in the car seat while you're on the highway going 65 mph. Poor little mite. The Boy was driving so I climbed into the back and wiped her little tears. He and I were on our way out to dinner with his family. My mother was keeping baby overnight. I called Gramma and alerted her to the situation and she met us in the driveway, swooped up the baby girl and whisked her off to a warm bath waiting in the very nice ceramic utility sink. The Boy and I want a square bathtub that comes up to our eye level. Sad to be so jealous of a baby's ability to look so tiny in a sink, but it's possible.
I chalked up her vomickin' to being car sick, as I get car sick very easily...especially so if I have to face backward like on the LIRR or subway. Egads. Look out stranger next to me...and open your briefcase.
We went to dinner and I picked her up the next morning at 7.30 a.m. She had gotten sick twice during the night. Okay. So, not car sick. She ended up puking up the entire contents of her breakfast all down my tee shirt and velour zip-up hoodie. It is times like that when you realize, yes, I do love this person. I didn't even flinch or blink or nearly gag. But I am quite certain, had it been anyone else's child, I probably would've have fainted right there in a pile of not-quite-half-digested vegan waffle and banana bits.
I took her home where she proceeded to throw up three more times, but not again after 3 p.m. I called the doctor-on-call and he said it was probably just a bug and to keep her hydrated. Duh. So I did. She didn't have dinner, but woke up at 2.15 a.m. Monday and ate an entire container of applesauce and kept it down. Later that more at the real wake-up time, she ate a whole banana and was fine. That afternoon, she asked for applesauce and threw it up. So I took her to the doctor. They said she wasn't dehydrated and to feed her normally, continue the fluids, give her a bottle (soy formula) and not the legendary BRAT diet.
I gave her a bottle that evening and she walked into the other room and barfed up nearly all of it onto the tile floor without missing a beat. That was the thing. No fever. Ever. Yet, she couldn't hold anything down. And after throwing up, she was the most cheerful child you'd ever seen.
Wednesday morning was a different story. She threw up six times in an hour and a half so I rushed her off to Children's Hospital. Emergency rooms are the Goodwill's of health care. No matter how dressed up you are--which I wasn't and I hadn't bathed since Monday night's semi-traumatic shower right after baby looked up at my dear friend and said, "I go two potties"--you look like a crazy homeless person and if you have a nice handbag they look at you like you shouldn't be shopping there.
Baby ended up getting an IV of fluids. Her glucose level was a 47; normal being 60-120. She has kept everything down since, demanding two bananas for breakfast and has eaten 400 puffy stars. I tried to get her to only have a few pieces of bread after I brought her back to The Boy's house but she was having none of it. With every handful of puffy stars and banana and crackers, I just KNEW she was going to puke it all up in mere seconds. But she did not. And, of course, she wasn't the least bit interested in drinking anything since her liquid cheeseburger at the hospital.
The wind outside had started to pick up. I'd heard it was going to be fairly windy that night. (I was hoping it wasn't going to be like the Hurricane Ike winds we'd inherited back in the early fall. The winds that ripped off my sunglasses and had me trapped against a planter for 25 minutes on my four minute walk to work.) I kept looking out the windows. Some trees were blowing and some weren't. It was very strange. I noticed a giant evergreen in the backyard of the neighbor's home and wondered how it had never fallen over. It is sooo tall and precariously placed on a hill.
About 45 minutes later, I put baby down and went into the kitchen to do some homework online. I wasn't in the kitchen ten minutes when I heard a sound I've never heard before. Suddenly the power went out and I was pretty sure it was a tornado ripping apart the house. From the bruises on my knees I'm quite certain I crawled my way out of the kitchen. I rammed my head into the banister when I'd made it out into the front room. I was screaming for The Boy and was desperately trying to climb my way up the stairs to the bedrooms. He has been sick for two weeks and had been asleep since the late afternoon.
I thought for sure the house was going to be swept away and that he and baby were going to be gone forever. My legs were Jell-O. I crawled into the baby's room and felt around for her bed. I couldn't see a thing. I tried to walk back downstairs but remembering how I'd already fallen down those stairs with her before I just sat down in the hall and cried. He came running downstairs and said, "It's okay. It's just the power. It's just the power." I said, "No! Something came into your kitchen." He walked past me and a few seconds later came out and asked, "Were you in the kitchen? Were you in the kitchen!?" I said, "Yes." He gave me a hug and said, "A tree came through the roof. It's just a tree."
A 65 foot tree fell onto his house and burst through his roof four feet from where I was standing. I am pretty sure I'm very lucky. I know I am very grateful that The Boy and the baby are safe and sound. I can't imagine what I would have done if it had truly been what I'd imagined.
The next morning while the tree parts were being cut out of three spots in his roof, we decided to go out to breakfast since the tree had knocked down the power lines and the kitchen was unusable. I went to start my car and...nothing. My fuel pump went out. Just talked to the service station and it's going to be $300 or so to fix. Great.
I am beginning to think trees hate me. When I moved in with my ex-husband, the 100-year-old tree in his front yard died. We moved and the 15-year-old tree in our front yard died. And now this. Maybe it's because of my stationery addiction. I'll try to be better.
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