Taking Charge ... or not.

It's the new year. And it's a long weekend. We thought that this would be perfect to take control of our life again. We have so many piles of things that need to be put away, thrown out, or brought to Good Will. We have so many things on our list of things to do, but it feels like we haven't made a lot of progress over the last few months. So this was going to be the weekend to catch up.

Here's what we did: we installed the new car seat, and we organized some stuff in our former office (now Annika's bedroom), where our bookshelves are.

So much for taking charge. Annika has been fighting a cold all week. On Friday afternoon, (yea for New Year's Day) she came down with a low-grade fever. We brought her into the doctor on Saturday, who found that she has an ear infection. The antibiotic that the doctor prescribed, amoxicillin, made Annika sicker. It made her lose her appetite completely and it also made her throw up every time we tried to give her the medicine. This morning, after fighting with Annie to get her to drink a couple of ounces of formula, only to have her throw it up, we called the doctor again and got a different prescription - azithromycin. She only has to take this one for 4 days, instead of 10 days. And she only has to take it once a day, instead of twice of day for the amoxicillin. And it seems to be easier to go down too - it tastes like "cherry" instead of "bubble gum." So things are slowly improving. She is still taking next to no formula, only 2 ounces at a time, and even those 2 ounces are a fight. But we also got her to take some Baby Motrin, which made her feel like her normal self for a couple of hours.

Hopefully, we'll all sleep better tonight. Annika was up every 2 1/2 hours or so for the last couple of nights. We are absolutely exhausted. It's going to be pretty hard to function at work with no sleep. Hopefully Annie's appetite comes back soon. It is really, really difficult when Annie's not drinking anything and we are so worried about dehydration, and yet there is very little we can do to fix the situation. We can shove a bottle in her mouth, but that doesn't mean she's going to drink from it. We can squirt water into her mouth, but there's only so much of that you can do at a time without her choking on it.

So, here we are at the end of our "take charge" weekend, and instead, I feel further behind. Ugh. I also feel that Jim and I are at the bottom of yet another learning curve - the "taking care of a sick baby" learning curve. Parenting is full of these steep learning curves.  Let's hope for good health soon, and a respite from these colds that seem to keep coming, one right after another.