Risk!

Look what my 7 year old (almost 8 years) did to me.

Yep. She's red. I'll admit to being a bit distracted, but she basically kicked my butt with very little coaching from me. I think I'd rather play Sorry!. Or Scrabble. I think I can still beat her at Scrabble...

First Day of School

Here is Amelia. She is starting 5th grade!! Wow. She is excited to have sponge curler curls in her hair. She is wearing a skirt we made together. She is not looking forward to math homework or doing response journals for reading.


Here is Margaret. She is starting 2nd grade. She is excited to be wearing her "Hannah Montana" outfit. She is also excited to have a calculator, highligher, and red pen in her supplies.



Here they are together.

Emergency Room Visit... all is well...

About 4 am Margaret climbed in bed and was laboring in her breathing. I asked her what was up and she said "it hurts". After a bit of waking up and deciding that she really was in pain (the pain was in her lower chest, right side, when she inhaled)... I took temperature (102) and decided it was probably pneumonia (maybe an asthma attack...but I have no experience with that so I was just being worried). And headed off to the Emergency Room at our Children's Hospital.

This was Margaret's 3rd trip to Children's ER. She had RSV at 7 weeks and was hospitalized for a week. She had pneumonia from Influenza type A when she was one, and was hospitalized for 4 days. Other than that she has been TOTALLY healthy. Praise God for that. (And praise God that I didn't know how serious RSV could be when she had that...)

I LOVE having a children's hospital. Having nurses that deal with kids all the time (and having the environment set up for kids) makes it so much easier.

As I suspected, they quickly checked her Oxygen Sat levels, listened to her chest, and decided we could just chill and wait for the doctor. The Triage nurse was guessing pneumonia. After the doc and X-ray images confirmed pneumonia in the right lung, we decided on a good dose of IV antibiotics right then and there... followed by more antibiotics, of course. Stupid mom was not totally awake and did not question the possibility of a viral pneumonia...but they didn't test for either. So I guess the antibiotics could be in vain.

Still...the nurses were angels (we were there over shift change) and all-in-all it was not a bad experience.

My baby is sleeping on the couch. It will be a day of TV and fudgecicles. If the antibiotics do the trick, she will be able to go to the first day of school tomorrow. I don't want to be the one to tell her she has to stay home. The doctor realized that it was first day of school and said to use our judgment on how she was feeling...since she will have been on drugs for 24 hours she is no risk to other kids.

Wow. Kind of started the day out a bit weird. But I'm very thankful that the experience turned out ok in the end. Margaret was a real trooper with the IV. She was a bit nervous when we told her what was going to happen. Almost tears, but she fought them back. She had to watch the nurse put it in. Wanted to keep the little sample they gave her. And just said "Ouch Ouch Ouch" as it went in. I'm so used to Amelia's drama whenever we have a procedure it was nice to have a child react a bit more calmly.