All bounced out

So we sleep under a Blessed sky tonight, and hope our luck holds for another 354 days.

Raise your glasses to 2010.

Dear friend H and her man P have just adopted a gorgeous boy, they brought him home yesterday. Congratulations guys, and little KB, you’re joining a great family and extended church family, and you already have totally devoted parents, welcome little guy:

A little background on H & I’s friendship, we’ve been friends for just about ever, or around age 12 anyhow. We went through some tough teens times together and remained inseperable even though for the most part we went to different high schools and universities. We even had this awkward teenage phase when we dressed in identical skimpy outfits (shod in the iconic 8 hole Docs), died our hair the same colour and trawled the malls and youth groups together. Aaah, those were the days. Thankfully there is precious little photographic evidence

I have the cutest 7 month old ever

This one’s more a testimony to the size of Hunny’s boot than it is the size of Aidan…

Happy chappie

This ones my favourite

I contemplated the title to this entry for a couple of days. Somehow joking about your own death doesn’t pack a punch, but joking about your child dying does. Funny that. But he didn’t die. Not even close. And thankfully, for the most part, I knew that he wouldn’t at the time.

Aidan gave us a big scare this past Easter weekend. When he got his first cold I thought I couldn’t possibly cope with more than that. But we got through it, and I felt stronger for that. Then when he got another cold/flu thingy and he ended up on antibiotics a month later I went through the same cycle: thinking that I couldn’t possibly cope with anything more than this, but as we emerged out the other side, feeling quite chuffed that we did.

Well, after last weekend I should feel positively pumping. So here’s a chronology of events. Warning for the squeamish – mention of blood, vomit and poop included

Saturday
10:30 AM: Drop Aidan at his Ouma’s (Afrikaans for granny) so we can go and do our monthly groceries uninterrupted, and because Ouma likes having Aidan to herself for a bit, and because he likes it too. He’s a little fractious when we leave, but he’s having a bottle and needs a nap, and we’re confident that Hunny’s mom can handle him

11:00 AM: Hunny’s mom phones while we’re sitting in some pointless and frustrating traffic resulting from a local craft market that doesn’t have easy enough access to it’s parking. I can hear Aidan crying in the background. MIL says he won’t settle and he’s vomited up his whole bottle and his morning porridge too. We do a quick about turn and race back.

11:15 AM: I’ve never seen my child this inconsolably unhappy before. He’s calm for a few minutes, and looks exhausted. Then he writhes in agony and contorts his little body, crying his heart out. We pack up his things and head straight to Sunninghill Casualty.

11:45 AM: Aidan has slept in the car chair on the way over, and seems more peaceful as we sit in the waiting room. As we are called though, he vomits again.

12:45 PM: The casualty doctors have given him some Buscopan for the cramps, some anti-nausea stuff, and some Stopain. They think its colic. We’re not 100% convinced, but he’s calm and he’s not vomiting or cramping. We go home.

14:45 PM: Aidan has had some water and some formula, and a nice long nap. But then he wakes up crying. I try to comfort him. He vomits all over me. Alwyn phones casualty and they say bring him in again.

15:30 PM: The doctor examines Aidan again, and sends him for x-rays.

16:00 PM: The x–rays show much gas but no obstructions. After Aidan vomited up the last of his stomach contents he seems happier, but is still cramping intermittently. Doctor still thinks its colic, and that I gave him too many fluids, and that’s what triggered it off again. Then he does a poo nappy. It’s red. Very red. You can smell the blood. I call the nurse. I assure her he hasn’t been eating beetroot.

16:30 PM: After doing another red nappy, Aidan seems happier, but the casualty nurses aren’t. One says dysentery. The others agree. I’m horrified. Where could he have picked that up from? Don’t children in poverty stricken villages in third world countries die from that?

16:45 PM: The nurses descend on mass. Taking bloods from his right foot. Inserting a drip needle into his left foot because the vein in his left collapsed. They’ve spoken to the Pediatrician on standby, she’s booking him in. I’m worried but trying not to let it show as I hold my child down for people to stick needles into him. Hunny is trying hard not to hit the doctors that don’t seem concerned enough or sympathetic enough.

17:30 PM: We’re in an isolation ward because of the dysentery thing. When I ask the nurse how he might have contracted dysentery she tells me about the virtues of hand washing. Aidan is on a fluid drip, antibiotics are on their way. He hasn’t cramped or vomited since the two red nappies. He’s dead tired but still trying to be charming for the nurses.

18:30 PM: The antibiotics are in the drip only a few minutes before Aidan kicks the needle loose and screams in pain. The nurse disconnects the drip, says she’ll be back in a few minutes to re-insert the needle. Hunny has gone home to feed the dogs and return with supplies. I’m staying with Aidan through the night, they let one parent stay. They provide a bed. Well, that’s what they call it.

19:10 PM: The night shift nurse introduces herself, says they’ll be back in a few minutes to take Aidan to reinsert his drip. My mom and sister have arrived to offer moral support. I nearly break down when I see them, but manage to pull myself together.

19:30 PM: Hunny arrives back with MacDonald’s, asks the nurses when they’re planning on reinserting Aidan’s drip needle. They’re busy, they’ll be there just now

20:15 PM: Finally, they take us to the procedure room to reinsert the drip needle. Only one parent can stay. I can’t leave my child, so it’s me. They scour his chubby limbs for a spot. The two good ones (his feet) are ruined, so they have to try a hand. Somehow this seems much worse than a foot to me. She manages it first time though, no mean feet. I can’t see a vein there.

21:00 PM: Mom and sis have gone, it’s just Hunny, Aidan and I in our isolation ward. Aidan’s finally falling asleep when the standby paediatrician arrives. She gets off on the wrong foot. “What’s the problem? Persistent high fever?” I start to loose it. No, I say. He’s been vomiting. Then she starts off about “… the thing with rotavirus” I cut her off. No-one has said rotavirus, they’ve said dysentery. She does a quick recovery by grouping the two together, and I stumble some kind of excuse-apology about it being a long day and everyone asking the same questions again and again. She carries on speaking, to Hunny only. I put my head on the bed next to my child and listen. Why is everyone writing down his symptoms if no-one is reading them?

21:10 PM: Aidan’s first blood test results arrive while the pead is still there. She explains them to us. She’s actually okay, I just wish she’d read the file before she came in. He’s not dehydrated, and has negative counts for bacterial infections, so the antibiotics are probably a waste of time. She’ll give him one more dose tomorrow just in case. No food for Aidan tonight though, I’m wondering how I’ll get him to sleep on an empty tummy.

22:00 PM: The ‘bed’ is a fold out armchair thing that looks as uncomfortable as it feels. Hunny’s just left, and Aidan and I are settling down for the night.
Sunday
04:45 AM: Aidan is awake and chipper. Not another symptom since the two red nappies the day before. Nurses came and went throughout the night, checking his vitals. We both got some sleep, but Aidan more than me. His bed was more comfortable. I could feel the bruises forming on my hips if I stayed in the same position for more than half an hour.

06:00 AM: I can’t distract him anymore, the boy is HUNGRY. I give him 50 ml’s he gobbles it down and cries with betrayal. I give him another 50 ml’s. He’s still not impressed.

07:15 AM: Hunny arrives with coffee for me and yoghurt for Aidan. I leave Aidan under his dad’s watchful eye while I wash-up and apply some make-up, so that I don’t look like the sick one. We give him some yoghurt at 8, he loves it:

11:45 AM: Hunny’s folks come to visit. His mom is so concerned that he’ll relate the terrible experience to her. I assure her that he won’t remember, and if he does then my betrayal is more memorable: I held him down for people to stick him with needles. I have the memory of my mom doing the same during a particularly bad bout of gastro when I was about 5. I couldn’t believe it at the time, my mom holding me down for the nurse while she gave me an injection. We’ve come full circle.

14:00 PM: We’re still at the hospital, but it’s looking likely that we’ll go home today. The paed will visit us later.

14:30 PM: We’re clear to go! The last bloods and cultures came back. The paed explains then to us. They tell us nothing. Negative for all the common viruses they check. Negative for bacteria. Paed doesn’t think he’s contagious. It no longer appears to be dysentery. We don’t know what it is, but further testing is deemed unnecessary.

15:00 PM: We’re home. Aidan and I take a nice nap together. It feels so surreal.

Two days later my relief at having a healthy child back has given way to frustration at not knowing what caused this. If I don’t know what it was then I don’t know what I can do to prevent it from happening again. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t dysentery. He was missing the major defining symptom. He never had diarrhea. He had also righted himself within 5 hours of the start of the symptoms, before the antibiotics had been administered. All forms of dysentery seem to have an onset of days. I’ve googled his symptoms and come up with one plausible but incomplete theory. I know I’ll need to let it go, but I’m not ready to just yet.

But my son is okay. If it weren’t for the 3 prick marks you wouldn’t know it ever happened. We have learnt one thing from this though: trust our instincts. Neither of us was convinced about the colic theory. We should have pushed harder at the first casualty visit.

And I’m proud of us. We made it through this. Back to the title of this post, I confronted a major fear of mine. Since he was born I have been harboring a fear of taking Aidan to the emergency room. Because then they might admit him. And I didn’t know if or how I would cope with that. Now it has happened, and I coped, and it’s not so scary anymore.

One of the most frequently asked questions to new moms who return to work is “So what did you do with the little one?”. If you say he’s at crèche, that’s usually followed by “So was it difficult dropping him off on his first day?” My honest answer: “Not really” I knew he was in good hands, and I was going to pick him up in a few hours, and I thought that he might benefit from someone a little more creative and entertaining than his mom for a bit.

What was difficult was at the end of the week, when he came down with his first fever, and then the next week, when he was full-blown sick with a cold: sore throat, phlegm in his throat & lungs, coughing. That’s what was difficult to handle. Then I did feel like an awful mother, subjecting my baby boy to that because I was selfish enough to go back to work.

He has recovered now, and without the use of antibiotics, thankfully, but not before he infected me, my mom and his dad. When I mention this to anyone else with small children in crèche or nursery school, they all smile knowingly and say “Ah, crèche syndrome”. My head knew it would happen, but my heart didn’t realize how awful I would feel when I couldn’t make my little boy better right away. That and knowing that I subjected him to the germs in the first place … Well, it was a rough week.

Now the poor boy is subjected to so many temperature checks that I swear his bum cheeks squeeze together when he sees the thermometer coming. Yes I know I could take an armpit temp, or get a fancy ear or forehead or dummy-shaped thermometer, but my reference book says bum temp’s are the most accurate, and if I’m not going to be a stay at home mom I must at least be accurate. I take his temp when I know its fine, and when I know it’s not. I obsess about it if I put him to bed without a temp check, and then do one at his midnight feed when I’m supposed to be doing my best not to wake him up completely. *sigh* At least he’s healthy again, for now.

Anyway, for June, and any other readers who are into photos of gorgeous baby boys, here he is. Click to enlarge.

I can sit!

With even a smidgen of concentration left to smile

but a little late. It was hard to choose just a couple from the 200 + photos Hunny took on the first day alone!

On my brithday:

Homecoming:

Yawn:

Have so much to say, but it will take sometime to pull together into a post… I’ll get there…

I don’t know if many of you know the site icanhascheezburger.com it’s dedicated to pictures of cats doing funny things with badly spelt captions attached. I love it. I get a daily email from them of the latest pics added. Some of them are real classics.

I like cats, I have a little old kitty of my own who has appeared on my blog from time to time. Her name is PussyCat, and she is now 11 years old. She has some candid moments of her own, though she’s quite shy so they aren’t to frequent and are difficult to capture on film. As soon as you get up to fetch the camera, she disappears.

I’ve captured a few shots of her recently though, all cell phone camera images, so quality isn’t great, but I’m sharing them with you anyway …

Being a timid cat, she doesn’t go outside much, and when she does she never leaves the patio. This is PCat feeling some earth between her toes:

Getting some greenery:

She kept me company when I was studying for my exam last week:

Keeping an eye on me:

Inside out:

Well I do right at this moment, anyway. Junior has discovered that he can stretch all four limbs in different directions at once. The result is a decidedly square looking tummy.

Thankfully he doesn’t do it all the time; here is a pick of me in all my round glory:

Any time I spent small and petite in early pregnancy I am making up for now. People can’t stop commenting on how big my mid section is. That part isn’t so fun.

Pregnancy is such a visible affair and it brings out tactlessness in so many people. I’m feeling more and more defined by my bump these days. Not from my close friends and family, they still recognize that I’m Alex first and then pregnant, hmm I dunno, maybe third or fourth. But to strangers and acquaintances it seems I am just a pregnant belly with some limbs attached.

I think this has been the most frustrating thing about my pregnancy so far. Just this morning I was singled out four times in a ‘congratulations on your promotion and where to from here’ meeting as having to make big decisions about work, career and work-life balance. There were several other people in the room with children and time consuming social pursuits but they weren’t pregnant, so they weren’t Mr. Managers on the fly case study. It took a lot of restraint not to say to tell the man that I’m not asking for any favors so to leave my personal life to me and just judge me on my work please!

Later that morning when I was stopping in at my nearest woolies for some cake to offer my colleagues ( It’s my birthday today ) I was stopped in the isles by a stranger who whipped out a home pregnancy test from her bag, showed it to me, and asked me if I thought she was pregnant! No seriously folks, I’m not making this up, this actually happened! I was totally amazed. And she had a toddler in her trolley! Surely she would know how to read these things as well I? The test had a rather feint second line, so I mumbled something about yeah, it could be, but do another test in a couple of days time and then bolted for the check-out line.

In other alarming news, I got hacked. Well, my blog did, but it doesn’t seem like they were very good at it. Read Hunny’s post about it here. It would seem that this is what has been wrong with my RSS feed, and I apologize if anyone was subjected to Viagra advertising through my site, though it doesn’t seem like the hack attempt managed to do anything.

Well, that’s me for today. I spent most of my birthday working or at lectures or doing some more work from home. Poor me. I plan to do something more worthy of my last twenty-something birthday on the weekend. Like sleep in or something, because partying isn’t much fun when you keep bumping your stomach into people and you can’t have a drink.

We had our 4D scan on Wednesday, and I was hit with the startling realization that there is an actual kid in my belly. I know we’ve had 5 or 6 scans already, but the 4D one gave him flesh, and you can see it’s that soft squishy baby flesh. The stuff that looks like it’ll bruise if you touch it.

Here’s our little shy guy, hiding behind his arm and the umbilical cord.

I’m still struggling with stitching together the incessant wriggling under my skin with the concept of a real live kid that is mine (well, ours) to keep and look after, day in day out, whether I feel like it or not. I suppose that realization will only properly set in when the hospital sends him home with us.

I can picture me with a toddler or a young child, but I haven’t once been able to see myself with a baby. Like changing his nappy and stuff. I’m not worried about that yet though. I’m pretty sure the maternal instincts will kick in when Junior is born.

8 weeks and 5 days to go, and I’m pretty sure those are going to fly, given all the activities I have planned to pack in for a large part of that time. For 3.5 weeks at the end of August / beginning of September I have occupied my self for 4 of the 5 week nights. Mondays and Wednesdays are ante-natal classes, Tuesdays Hunny and I are involved in student ministry at the Midrand Graduate Institute, and Thursdays I have evening classes for the diploma I’m doing for work, wrapping up with an exam on the 5th of September and an assignment hand in on the 10th. At least after that there will be nothing much left to do until our C-Day on 1 October. Except of course work, which I’m planning on going on with until the 24th of September. So far I still feel fit and healthy, long may that last.

On another note, I’ve taking the long way around to get home this week, to avoid the intersection where 3 out of 10 drivers behave like law-ignoring A*holes. Usually I can handle it, I just do my best to prevent the road abusers from cutting in front of me and leave it at that. But the sterling (what sarcasm?) mood I have been in since my laptop started giving me a hard time on Monday has made me a prime candidate for a road rage charge. So I cleverly decided not to put myself in that situation. I also eventually decided to fix my own laptop, rather than have helpdesk spin me another line about what could be wrong with it, spend another half a day trying to fix it, and give it back to me only to have the problem recur. I’m no technical genius, but my gut feeling solution ended up fixing the problem. Alex 1 – Helpdesk 0.

But back to the traffic thing, why do people do that? Did they grow up with no respect for the laws of the land? This is South Africa; that could well be the case seeing as for quite a while 90% of the population was subjected to oppression via the law. Do they look at us folks sitting patiently in the queue, wondering why we don’t just run up the left lane and cut in to turn right at the top like they are doing? Bute we are 14 years into our democracy now and it just seems to be getting worse.

Or is it a superiority complex? Do these people think they are that much better or smarter or more in a hurry than the rest of us? I hate it, it makes me feel like a fool for obeying the rules of the road. Not to mention frustrated and some times red-angry.

Take a deep breath and let it out slowly … count to ten … okay now carry on.

Hunny got a new camera, an Olympus E-520, he is very chuffed with it. He has taken a ton of pictures; the good ones are available on his new photo blog.

This is one of my favourites. Hunny doesn’t like how busy the background is, but I think it captures the two boys‘ personalities well. Pickle all big and brave, and Dartmoor checking out the suspicious activity from behind his mate. I love my funny horse.

Ps. How dry and dusty is this winter? Can’t wait for spring.