Coughing, Coughing, and More Coughing

It's been a looooooong week around here. Will's been getting progressively better. He feels better and has more energy each day. The problem is that he still has a horrible, racking cough that strikes him several times a day. At it's best, it's incredibly annoying. At it's worst, it chokes him to the point that he's gagging and his lips are blue. Obviously, it's scary and upsetting to him, and he just cries, "Mommy, mommy" until it's over. Just imagine how frustrating it is to hold your coughing, gasping baby over and over each day, knowing that there's not a damn thing you can do to help him. It's awful, and it's been happening all hours of the day and night for the last seven days. It's maddening and exhausting.

And as if the coughing fits weren't enough, it's been an endless cycle of medicine and nebulizer treatments (or as we call them, hose noses) I swear, every time I turn around it's time to force another spoonful of antibiotics, or steroids, or cough medicine down his throat. And if I'm not doing that, I'm fighting with him to keep the mask on while I administer yet another hose nose. All of this punctuated by incessant coughing! It's enough to make a mom lose her mind!!!

I just keep telling myself that it won't last forever, and doing it at home beats doing it in the hospital. But it's very little consolation when you're by yourself, day in and day out, trying to be the nurse and the mommy and the cook and the housekeeper. (though from the current state of things, it would appear that the housekeeper took the week off. But hey, something's gotta give!) Hopefully we've only got a few more days of it sounding like the tuberculosis ward around here. I'm not sure I can take it for more than a few more days, so I'm crossing my fingers really hard.

My New Blog

After thinking about it for a while, I started a new blog. It's called "What Cameron's Cooking..." and as the title would lead you to believe, it's all about what I'm cooking on any given day. I love to cook and collect awesome recipes. I especially love to cook for my friends and family. Since many of you are too far away to come for dinner, I'm sharing the recipes I love. So now, not only can you read about all the craziness of daily life, you can feel like you're sitting at our dinner table (minus the twins throwing food at you). There's a handy dandy link to your right, click on it and join us for dinner!

Screw You, Three!

I've been a member of a message board for twin moms since the day I found out I was expecting twins. I came home from that fateful doctors appointment and went online in search of someone to talk me down from the ledge of panic and fear I was standing on. I found a great group of girls that did that and more. Over the last three years we have shared confidences and given advice, and while I have only had the pleasure of meeting one in person, they have truly become soul sisters. I realize that, as with any online community, any of them could actually be creepy guys in a dark basement with pictures of their "kids" coming right out of the frame they bought at Walmart (that would actually explain a lot about one girl, but that's another story for another time). But creepy guy possibilities aside, they're awesome and I love 'em.

I checked in yesterday to see that one had posted a thread asking if anyone had started planning for their twins' upcoming third birthdays. That stopped me in my tracks. Third birthday? THIRD BIRTHDAY?????? How can they be turning three?? And how can they be turning three so soon that we're talking about birthday parties? Three is so old. A three year old is a preschooler. Not a baby, not even a toddler, a preschooler. And Will and Hays are my babies. Two I can handle, even 2 1/2, but three is out of the question.

I am not ready for them to move completely, irrevocably out of the baby stage. Plus, three means that I absolutely have to get them potty trained, and that is a monumental task that I'm not sure I can fully face. We've been dabbling in potty usage, but I have not committed to hardcore potty training. That's okay at two, but unacceptable at three. Plus, three year olds need to know their colors, numbers and ABCs. Mine still insist that everything is red, count "1, 2, 2, 5, 8...." and Will sings "A, B, C, D, D, D, D..." (Hays has a little better handle on the ABCs, but I'm still not sure he's at 3 year old level).

And plus, I'm not ready to let my sweet babies become big boys. I love my cuddly, snuggly boys that still say, "Mommy hold you" every day, and I am not ready to let that go. These guys are the last stop on the baby train for us (unless we win the lottery or science finds a way to guarantee a girl) and I'm not in any big hurry for it to end. Sure, you can do more with big kids, and big kids are really funny and insightful, but babies are SO SWEET!!!!

So I'm boycotting the third birthday. I'm keeping them two, and that's all there is to it. I'm not quite sure yet how I'm going to do that, but I'm going to find a way!

Home Sweet Home

We're home, thank goodness, and Will is MUCH better. We were released around 7:00 Monday evening. Will had had a pretty good day, and his sats were staying in the mid-high 90s even when he was sleeping. He was still feeling pretty crappy and laid around most of the day, but he didn't have any fever and wasn't requiring any oxygen. I spent the whole day praying that we would all be sleeping in our own beds that night!!!

Admittedly, it wasn't a very restful night. I was coughing my brains out, Hays was waking up over and over (the pediatrician thinks Hays and I both had walking pneumonia as well) and we had to give Will nebulizer treatments every four hours. But I'd rather have a sleepless night at home than a sleepless night in the hospital!

Both boys were pretty puny yesterday and spent most of the day lying on the couch watching tv. Will had a bad, bad coughing fit in the morning. It lasted about a half hour and had him turning purple from time to time. I was scared to death that we would be heading right back to St. Mary's, but the pediatrician reassured me that it was to be expected, and that a bigger dose of cough medicine would help. It did, and though he did a fair amount of coughing throughout the day, he stopped turning bluish-purple!

And today, they both seem just about back to their normal, rambunctious selves. They have a little less energy than they usually do, but not much less. They have more than enough to fight, play, and attempt to take the house apart, so I think they're on the mend!

The Funk

The plague has descended upon our house. Hays started getting a cold last weekend, I followed suite a couple of days later, and now Will is in its clutches. It has made for a long, miserable, snotty, whiny week.

It's been fairly impossible to make Hays happy all week. He's normally a pretty laid back, compliant little dude, but not when he's sick. If he's not feeling good, he's a grumpy little bear, and that's certainly been the case this week.
"Hays, do you want to watch a Baby Einstein movie?"
"No!"
"Do you want a snack?"
"No snack!!!"
"Do you want to play outside?"
"No play outside!!!"
It was particularly fun when I had to take them to Publix. I made the dreadful mistake of getting Hays a chocolate chip cookie, instead of the sprinkle cookie he apparently wanted, so he promptly threw it on the floor and screamed "Cooooooooookie" through the rest of the shopping trip. Lovely.

Now, when Will's sick, he doesn't get mean, he gets pitiful. He's actually ten times easier to manage when he's sick because he's too listless to get up to his usual shenanigans. The downside is that Will being sick is terrifying. From the first sniffle, we start worrying if his cold is going to settle into his lungs. The more congested he gets, the more we worry. Once the coughing starts, I'm constantly wondering if it's just a matter of time before we have to head to the emergency room. He had a rough time last night. Lots of bad coughing fits, and we had to get him up twice to give him Albuterol. For now, it's working, and hopefully a strict regimen of steroid breathing treatments twice a day and Albuterol every four hours will get us through this bout of funk without a trip to St. Mary's, but only time will tell. Who knew the common cold could be so freakin' scary?

***UPDATE***
Maybe I should be careful about what I blog, because not two hours after I posted this, we were sitting in the ER. Will woke up this morning with a near-constant cough, and having been through this before, I didn't hesitate to head over to St. Mary's once an Albuterol treatment didn't make a dent in his symptoms. We spent five hours in the ER to get 3 breathing treatments, one RSV test, two chest x-rays, a dose of steroids and an antibiotic shot. I figured they'd send us home after that, because they always have in the past, but no such luck.
He fell asleep for a little while on Matt's chest, and his oxygen sats dropped way low- like 85- and they had to put him on oxygen. Oxygen= at least one night in the hospital. So they finally admitted us after we spent five hours in a tiny curtained cubicle, listening to the woman next to us moan like she was dying.
Once we got to the room, Will was all jacked up on breathing treatments and steroids and spent the next 30 minutes trying to take the room apart. Luckily, he ran out of steam pretty quickly and was relatively content to lay around and snuggle with me. I stayed with him all afternoon and Matt's spending the night with him. Matt can sleep anywhere, so while it won't be a pleasant night, he should be able to get some rest. I, on the other hand, often can't sleep at home in my own bed, so I sure wouldn't sleep at the hospital. And God knows, we both need sleep because tomorrow will be another long day. But I'm still sitting at home dealing with my mom guilt over not staying. Even though his daddy is there and he was dead to the world when I left. Doesn't matter. If I was there, I would feel mom guilt for not being home when Mason and Hays got up. And now that I'm here I feel mom guilt that I'm not at the hospital. You can't win.
But I talked to Matt about an hour ago. Will's passed out cold. He woke up briefly, got some cough medicine and refused to sleep[ without his oxygen mask. We figured he'd fight that thing tooth and nail, but I guess he realized it's a heck of a lot easier to sleep when you can breathe easily. He's surprised me a lot today. I swore up and down to the nurses that he'd yank an IV right out, but he's been perfect with it. Every time he started messing with it, I just had to tell him, "Leave your robot arm alone or you'll hurt it," and he's quit messing with it. I guess that kid knows what he needs. He's always been quite intuitive about what he needs. Don't forget, this is the child that removed his own trach and g-tube. Guess we just have to trust him!!
So now I'm heading to bed, trying to rest up for tomorrow. I know that my future holds a toddler with 'roid rage who's feeling better but is still cooped up in a little hospital room. I've got a backpack of toys ready for him. Pray that his oxygen stats stay up and we bring him home tomorrow. This is one mama hen that does not like having a chick (and her rooster) missing from her nest.

Ouch.....

This is the result of a backyard fall today. School pictures are tomorrow. I hope the photographer is good with photoshop.....

Walking Man

During the last week or so, Mason and I have started walking together in the evenings. It has obvious benefits, such as getting me and our dog off our fat asses to get some exercise, but it's had unanticipated rewards as well. I hadn't planned to make this a mom and Mason activity. He used to start complaining thirty feet into a walk about his feet being tired, being bored etc., so the last thing I expected to hear when I told him I was taking the dog for a walk was, "I think I'll come with you." At first I was wary and gave him lots of warnings like, "we're going all around the neighborhood, even the big hills, and I don't want to hear any complaining!" I was pleasantly surprised when not only did he not complain, he wanted to walk much farther than I had planned!

And that long walk turned out to be an amazing thing. I got 30 minutes to just be with my son. We got to talk with no interruptions. He told me things about school and his friends. I got to take a break from telling him what to do and just enjoy him, and it was awesome. I had this time to appreciate how smart and funny he is, to look at him and truly see him, instead of casting a harried glance as I rush to get everything done. It was really a precious time, and I told him when we got home how much I'd enjoyed his company. I figured it would be a one, maybe two time thing before he tired of it, but so far he's asked every night if we can walk together. And every night has been just as special as the first.

I realize that I am really lucky to have these moments with him. I know that all too soon the day will come that walking with his mom will be the last thing on earth Mason wants to do. But I'm going to relish every bit of it while I can.