Well this beats everything...

I know in the whole scheme of things, I have a perfect little life with nothing to complain about. There are people starving and suffering everywhere, living in poverty and I do feel very, very fortunate that we are happy and healthy and living in America. However, recently, with Noah (and both me and David) being so sick for what seemed like an eternity and our vacation being less than relaxing, a couple of our close friends made the joke that “our house has a curse on it” and laughed it off. Well due to recent events……I’m not so sure how outrageous that comment was! Wait til you hear what happened a couple of days ago. No, I haven’t been watching too many episodes of “Ghost-Hunter” (well, I have, but that is another story…). David, my handy husband, decided to update and fix up our plain, white fireplace mantle. I never in a million years would have known anything could be (or needed to be) done to this fireplace mantle as it looked perfectly fine to me but I am thrilled he thinks he can make it look better. He bought some decorative molding and built some columns to put on the sides. I’ve been harassing him for weeks because he started this project and didn’t finish it so the fireplace has had exposed, unpainted wood, etc and it has been driving me crazy (What? Is he busy or something? Ha ha). Anyway, he finally got around to finishing it a couple of days ago. After taking off the old part of the mantle and the old molding, etc he saw this little piece of cardboard or something inside the tiny crack in the wall of the fireplace and pulled it out only to discover it was a Tarot card! Not that we know anything about them, but to us and to the few other people we showed it to this weekend, everyone seems to agree it is definitely a tarot card. Because of how it was in there, it had to be placed there deliberately when the house was being built 25 years ago before the fireplace was built in front of it. I've tried searching the internet for an explanation of the card but can find nothing that looks like it. One side is black with a funky red star (luckily not the “Satanic” star…at least I don’t think it is) and inside the red star is a red five-leaf clover. I searched "five-leaf" clover and from what I can find that means bad luck (lovely!) but I can't find anything else about that being on a card. The other side is a strange multi-colored cross with lots of other small symbols around it. Not that I really believe in any of this stuff but I find the discovery of this card quite interesting and I want to make sure there isn't some creepy curse on my house!!! I’ve been told I need to “sage the house” just to be safe. EXCUSE ME?

So, Like I said, I really don’t believe in any of this (sure, I played the typical Ouija board games and séance games at all my childhood slumber parties) but we can’t help but being a little creeped out about it. I guess time will tell. If nothing else, it gives us something fun to talk about this weekend at our neighborhood adult social!

Who knew wine could be so dangerous?

Well my foot is almost better. What’s wrong with my foot you might ask? Did I injure it this past week when David and I actually successfully exercised 2 whole nights in a row by walking around the neighborhood? Nope. Did I twist my ankle while wearing some trendy, expensive high heeled shoes? No way. Did I trip over one of Noah’s million pieces of Legos that are covering every square inch of my once toy-free home? No, not this time. What actually happened is that I very nearly broke my foot last Thursday when an unopened and quite heavy bottle of wine came tumbling from the sky (ok, the top shelf of the guest room closet) onto my poor, unsuspecting bare foot. To say it was merely painful would be a dreadful understatement. I saw stars. I knew for sure that every bone in my foot had shattered. I really thought I was going to pass out from the pain and that some poor soul would find me unconscious (in my pajamas still at noon no less) in the guest room with a bottle of wine laying next to me and that Noah would be running wild and unsupervised through the house having destroyed it, colored on the walls and probably would have gone through my underwear drawer and strung it all over the house (no this hasn’t happened…yet). The good news is that I did not pass out, I managed to get it together enough to hop out of the guest room and corral Noah into safety and in fact, my foot was not broken. (Three useless hours in the waiting room for x-rays at Urgent Care proved that). Although I must say, you know you are a busy stay-at-home mom when a quiet waiting room at Urgent Care doesn’t seem to bother you for 3 whole hours of peace…I kinda wished I’d brought some nail polish and a paraffin hand wax kit along with me to complete my “spa” time while away from home. Oh yeah, I was all bruised up and in lots of pain….but, still…I wonder if anyone there would have really minded the nail polish fumes. I’ll have to remember to “pack” better for my next solo trip to urgent care. After all I need to better manage my “Cristie” time.
I should probably explain why there was a bottle of wine in my guest room closet, in case you are thinking I am in AA or something and have the need to hide booze around the house! A certain family member (who shall remain anonymous) brought it back from South Africa as a gift for someone else but left it here at my house by mistake. I put it up in the guest room closet for “safe keeping” and of course, forgot about it until that dreadful moment I had the bright idea to do some closet cleaning. I guess the moral of the story is that when someone leaves an expensive bottle of wine at your house meant for someone else, you should just drink it!

Learning curves

I’m having a hard time getting going this morning, partly because I’m back to not sleeping well, (my norm) and partly because I am still in complete shock over the American Idol results last night. I admit it-I am obsessed with that show. I can not believe Carly got voted off and not Jason. I really wonder about the brain activity involved with the American voters…not that I am taking the trouble to vote or anything, but still, I have a right to complain. :)

Noah, feeling much better I suppose, has had a bit of a mischievous streak in him the last day or so so I am searching for ways to get him out the house today. Some things I’ve discovered recently about being the mom of an 18-month old:

1. It was unwise and unrealistic of me to think that just because I had made it this far without dealing with stranger anxiety from Noah I was safe. All those months when my friends’ 6-month olds, 8-month olds, 1-year olds, etc would cry and scream when out of mom’s sight I secretly sat back and thought how lucky I was that MY child wasn’t like that. Well, forget that. It has happened…big time separation anxiety. I can’t get 6 inches out of his sight without him screaming and putting on the most pitiful show. It is heartbreaking. I used to be able to drop him off at Mom’s Morning Out or The Church Nursery knowing that while all the other kiddos were in there crying he was perfectly content, but no more. The other day he was pulling on my pants leg so hard, trying to crawl up my legs begging me not to leave him, that he very nearly pulled my pants off. Now this could get embarrassing. It is certainly getting annoying.

2. It is unwise to now let an 18-month old run around the house with nothing on but a shirt and a clean diaper. Pants are no longer optional. Those Velcro diaper tabs have finally gotten the best of his curiosity and “off with the diaper!” it goes. (and then you step in a “lovely” mystery puddle on the kitchen floor before discovering said diaper is now off). Another thing one doesn’t want to learn about the hard way. Oh well.

3. Things that make absolutely no sense to me make perfect sense to a toddler, such as why he will no longer eat a PB&J sandwich (which he loved up until this week) unless it is in bite sized pieces served to him on a spoon. Or why we can spend months and months trying to teach him to wave and say "bye bye" to people and he has refused to do it but then yesterday I caught him dropping a bunch of crackers through the slats in the airvent on the kitchen floor and then waving at them shouting "Byeeee-Byeeee" Huh?

I’m sure I will be adding many, many more things to this list in the months to come. Such a learning curve.

I had forgotten what a healthy child was like!

Well we made it in to see the pediatrician today for Noah’s 18-month well-visit check up. That’s right “well-visit”. Yep, we got to sit on the side of the waiting room for well kids, not the quarantined “as if you have the plague” side for “sick kids” only. The ironic and completely sad thing is that when we walked in I saw a mom with 3 small children in the “sick kids” waiting room and they happened to be Noah’s cousins, whom I’m pretty sure he infected when he played with them last weekend. Now they all have his crud. I mouthed an “I’m soooo sorry” to Amy through the waiting room glass separating us. As difficult as out last 4 weeks have been with illness, I can at least look on the bright side and be relieved I’m not taking care of a sick 4 year old along with sick 3-month old twins…Anyway, Noah, finally, got a clean bill of health. (It felt very odd to not leave the pediatrician office and head straight to the pharmacy…I bet the pharmacist is wondering where I have been the last few days….) Noah dutifully screamed throughout the entire visit and acted as if Dr Colon was absolutely murdering him when in fact she did not do one remotely painful thing to him. In that respect, I was relieved that the only other patients in the entire doctor’s office happened to be our family members! He weighed in at 25 pounds, 10 ounces and was a whopping 34 inches tall which basically all means he is very tall and fairly skinny. He has consistently been at least in the 90th percentile for height all along so it looks like we’re gonna have an amazon on our hands. David is already imagining sports positions for him to play….although now that I am a mom, I think I would have to take a valium to watch my sweet baby play any rough sport. Now when watching college football in the fall I actually cry when I see a player get injured because I feel so bad for that poor kid’s mamma somewhere….but I digress.

Noah’s language skills are beginning to form and it is so much fun watching him learn something new. As many things as he learns each day, his favorite word to say is still “da-da”. He wakes up calling for David, says it in his dreams, wanders around the house calling for David, opens up all the closed doors calling Daddy’s name, etc. I take care of him all day long but ALL I hear is Da-Da, which I know is normal but at times it is annoying. At times it is embarrassing. We went to the grocery store today and Noah was sitting up in the shopping cart and, I am not exaggerating at all, to every single human being that got within10 feet of him he looked them STRAIGHT in the eyes and in his LOUDEST voice ever shouted “Daaa-Daaa!” very pointedly as if he was exclaiming “Ah-ha, I have finally found you!” The first few times it was funny, especially when he did it to the 80-year old woman…but then it became a little embarrassing as if I was carting around some poor illegitimate kid who had no idea who his daddy was. He singled out this one particular man, who I must say looked NOTHING like David, and we happened to run into him on like every single aisle and without missing a beat, Noah screamed “Da-Da” straight to his face every time. By the 10th time this man seemed a little concerned over this development and probably thought I was stalking him for child support or something. Other than that it was a pretty good shopping experience—I didn’t get up to the counter with 4 jars of cinnamon I didn’t want (he is so sneaky), crushed up teddy grahams in my hair, I wasn’t cursing and there was no one complaining that he had thrown goldfish at them. But…there’s always next week.

Vacation is over...Thank Goodness

I can't believe how happy I actually am to be home from a vacation I spent months looking forward to and counting down the days for. Seven days in a beautiful beach front home with my wonderful family, reading books on the beach while Noah played happily in the sand. Oh wait...that is what i THOUGHT would happen. The last few days of the vacation were much like the first few days. We survived the hospital visit on Wednesday and naturally Noah woke up Thursday morning with his fever miraculously broken (had we just waited 12 more more hours to go to the hospital...) but he still clearly felt bad and was not up to par for sure. Still very cranky, not sleeping, not eating and in obvious ear pain. And then came the rash! Finally, we had an answer to this crazy high fever. We figured out it must be Roseola, or "baby measles". The poor kid. In a matter of 3 weeks he has suffered from a sinus infection, tonsilitis, bronchitis, double ear infection...and now Roseola. I am going to wrap him in bubble wrap when we get home and never leave the house with him again! Anyway, David and I did manage to go out to a nice water-front dinner that evening for our 4th Anniversary while Noah stayed at the house with my parents. Of course, we were so exhausted, drained and worried about Noah we came home hours before we had planned. Oh well, there will be more chances to celebrate. Luckily by Saturday afternoon we had our "Noah" back and he was a new kid. Just in time for the final 12 hours of our vacation! So we tried to cram everything in to one day. We took a nice walk with him to Seaside (ok, he slept the whole time and didn't get much out of it) but I got to enjoy a mimosa on the walk home...we took him swimming in the pool (first time in the pool all week, how pathetic!) and we even worked in another trip to the beach and THIS time he did not act like the experience was the worst thing that could possibly happen to him. We got some great pictures so I am so glad the vacation ended on a good note! The trip home the next day was typical for a 2 family caravan--complete with kids vomiting (this time, not MY kid), getting lost (briefly, thanks to Mapquest's mistake), huge diaper blowouts and a 2 hour traffic jam in downtown Atlanta just when we were sooooo close to home! Noah was thrilled to have his own bed back, the kitty cat to chase around again and all his favorite toys to play with. He slept the night through and so did we which was a nice change of pace! Here are some of my favorite pictures from our ONE good hour at the beach! I love the one of my 74 year old father "racing" my 8 year old niece on the beach.

So I won't be needing a sandbox for Noah anytime soon...

Here are a few of the pictures from the beach--the one day we actually made it to the beach for a few precious moments! Noah absolutely hated the entire experience and screamed the whole time but cousins Shannon, Alyssa and Nicholas had a blast. My mom pointed out that I won't be needing to purchase a sandbox for Noah this summer since everytime we got him near the sand he acted like we were forcing him to walk across hot coals. Out of the hundreds of pictures I think I took I think we got Noah to smile in ONE of them!

At least Nicholas had fun!



Not so much fun for Noah...

Family pics

Sometimes the best laid plans...

To bring you up to speed (since I am over a week behind in blogging), this week was the week that we have been waiting months for: Our week long trip to Seagrove Beach with my sister and her entire family from Denver. My parents were driving up to meet us from Gainesville (built-in babysitters, we couldn't wait!) We splurged on an awesome rental house we knew was going to be awesome—steps from the beach, a heated pool and wrap around porches with gulf views. After us all being so sick we couldn't have been more anxious for a relaxing week full of sun, sand and sleep.

You might ask what could go wrong with this long anticipated, carefully planned, much awaited week-long beach trip? Well, here's the list:

1) Being so dreadfully sick before the trip that it is nearly impossible to even pack without needing an inhaler or heavy medical attention,
2) A 7 hour long caravan road trip with 4 kids and 4 adults,
3) A kid puking up undigested french fries on aforementioned caravan road trip (yes that was MY kid),
4) An abrupt and complete change in the weather resulting in “uncharacteristically frigid temperatures for this time of year”,
5) a kid who was supposed to be well by now after a week of antibiotics having such a severe relapse that he needed to be taken to local hospital for a ridiculous number of useless tests (once again, MY kid)
6) Waking up half way through the trip and realizing you’ve never seen the beach yet because you’ve been stuck in the house dealing with 1-6 above…
7) Finally declaring above sick child well enough (when one’s fever has been nearly 104 for 3 days, “well” means conscious and fever below 102…to actually step foot on the beach only to find out that said child HATES the beach and is apt to scream the entire time we are actually outside…

Yeah, we're only at the halfway mark but that about sums it all up in a nutshell. I wish I could say the reason I was so behind on my blogging was because I had been frolicking on the beautiful white sand all week with my husband, child and family and creating fond, lifelong memories of Noah’s first trip to the beach. But, that is certainly not the case. I’ve spent most of the week taking Noah’s temperature 20 different ways (he screams at all of them), going back and forth to the drug store, making daily phone calls to my pediatrician in Atlanta, and praying for this God- awful fever to come down. Not to mention it has been so ridiculously cold that we have had to re-wash our one pair of long pants and one long sleeve sweatshirt several times to re-wear while all our cute sleeveless beach clothes are still packed…(we knew the weather forecast but we were trying to be optimistic!)
So we finally broke down yesterday (Wednesday) and took Noah to the local hospital. His fever just would not break and I started having horrible thoughts that this whole time he was really sick with something severe and I was just pumping him full of Motrin and begging him to get over this virus so we could enjoy the beach. Naturally we walked in to the hospital and he looked awful enough to get us seen right away but they gave him a dose of Motrin (like I hadn’t thought of that) and he perked right up and started flirting with all the nurses. Several chest xrays, IVs, blood tests, pokes, prods and endless and LOUD screaming later—we were leaving the hospital with the diagnosis of absolutely nothing being wrong with this child. “just one of those unexplained child viruses that cause a high fever”. Nothing to worry about. Yeah right, nothing to worry about my foot. How about this once in a lifetime vacation we messed up and have missed!
So, the good news today is Noah seems to be feeling a bit better but the bad news is we discovered he absolutely without a doubt HATES the beach with everything he has in him. He wouldn’t come close to even touching the sand without screaming. Oh well.
Today is my 4-year wedding anniversary with David so we are going out for a nice dinner ALONE and Noah is staying with the grandparents. And darn it, we are going to enjoy ourselves no matter what! There are 2 days left in this vacation and we have to try and cram everything into them so wish us luck!

Just call us the Nelson Infirmary...

I can't believe I actually used to question whether or not we should bother using David's medical benefits flex plan from work--you know that account where they take out pre-taxed money into an account for medical expenses throughout the year. I was always worried we wouldn't use all that we took out of his paycheck and then the money would be lost. He always told me with a young child we would certainly use it all up. I should have listened. The past 7 days, my house has been nothing but an infirmary. We have probably used every cent in that flex plan for the year already and Cigna is probably wondering what on earth we have going on in our household with all the claims they must be getting. Just since this past Sunday there have been two adult visits to Urgent Care and a pediatrician appointment. There have been at least 10 prescriptions filled that I can remember including various antibiotics, inhalers, cough medications, antibiotic ear drops, antibiotic eye drops, you name it. And, let's not forget the countless over-the-counter pharmaceutical purchases including all the OTC cold medicines that we dutifully tried first, all the sinus and allergy drugs we could get our hands on, the nose sprays, the cough drops, cough syrups, pink eye relief, vapor pads for the vaporizer, lysol and antibacterial wipes, airborne, probiotics for the antibiotics...the list could go on, I think you get the idea. The pharmacists at Rite Aid actually know the make and model of my car because as soon as I drive up in the drive-thru they hand me my medication and say "Here you go Mrs Nelson". Ive spent way more time conversing with physicians and pharmacists than any other adults in the past 2 weeks. How did we come to this you might ask? Really bad luck. There's nothing worse than 2 sick parents trying to take care of a sick child, especially when trying to be grown-up and honor all of our previous responsibilities such as work, work travel, church obligations, family obligations, etc. In hind site I wish we had just put up a "Quarantined" sign on our front door, pulled the shades, locked the doors and gone into a 2 week long hibernation. The entire ordeal started about 3 weeks ago when all the kids in Noah's playgroup caught a cold. He then shared it with us. IT sucked, it was a typical cold, but nothing much more. We thought we were over it within a few days but we never fully kicked it and by this week it had turned into full blown bronchitis and sinusitis in all of us. In addition poor Noah has a double ear infection and tonsilitis. The poor kid had green crud oozing from every orifice on his head (eyes, ears and nose). No one really wanted to come near him at the pediatrician's office. He was labeled "the oozing kid". After weeks of attempting to put drops in his eyes, drops in his ears, suctioning out his nose, giving him all the antibiotics and now the pro-biotics, the poor kid is traumatized and runs from us whenever we come near him. I used to think there could be nothing harder than giving medicine to a cat...well, this 18-month old is a big contender in winning that label. Our only goal now is to get better before Sunday which is when we leave on our much anticipated (and MUCH needed) week-long family vacation at Seagrove Beach. I am looking into getting an anti-bacterial bomb to go off in our house while we are gone. I think we're going to have to drive David's pick-up truck just so we can haul or huge medicine cabinet with us...

Recent pictures

You have to begin somewhere....

Where to start? I wish I had started a blog sooner in Noah's life. I had such high hopes of keeping scrapbooks and baby-books up to date. I just had no idea how time consuming this whole child rearing thing was going to be! Every day I realize there is something else I was wrong about before I had a child of my own. (but that is enough to fill an entire blog site) All those preconceptions and ideas and "i'll never do THAT when I have a kid"--yeah, all out the window. Noah teaches me grace and humility every day.

So why now? Why after 18 months am I finally starting a blog? Aside from some gentle prodding of my friends' (who's blogs I spy on daily) there have been some recent changes in our Nelson household that has prompted me to finally get this thing going. The main change is that I officially cut the strings this week to my job. Up until this week I was working part time (ok, VERY part time) as a Labor & Delivery nurse. After being a L&D nurse for nearly 10 years I was clinging to that job instead of quitting cold turkey. Nursing can be a wonderful career in that you can do it part time, fulltime, overtime or barely-time as I did it (1-2 shifts a month). However even the occasional night shift can wreck havoc on one's sleep schedule and poses some interesting childcare dilemmas when the childcare need is so sporadic. We decided that the best situation for our family at the moment was to have me home fulltime with Noah. (Actually I think David decided that he was tired of coming home to a raving lunatic after I had taken care of Noah all day, then worked all night, then taken care of him all day the next day with no sleep....but that is another story).

Soooo, it has been very strange to close that chapter of my life. While I know I may very well go back to work some day, the reality is it probably wouldn't be to the same hustle and bustle of a busy maternity ward. After taking a 5-6 year "sebatical" it would be very hard to go back to the crazy life and death situations of moms and babies potentially "coding", hemorrhageing, needing stat-c/sections and all the other occasional stressful OB emergencies. That stuff was challenging and adrenaline pumping when I did it fulltime, but now that it has been so rarely that I work and I am "out of practice" it was nothing more than some very unnecessary stress and worry.

So basically, I thought with all the recent changes this was as good a time as any to start this blog thing....finally. Hopefully I can keep it somewhat updated and it can be a great communication tool for my friends and family--many of who live so far away now. Since I am starting it 18 months into Noah's life I am going to post some of my favorite photos of him from the past 18 months. Hope you enjoy. And wish me luck in this endeavor!