stupid sickness

the title pretty much sums up how i feel about the never ending sickness that has plagued our house for over a month. it has come and gone in varying degrees during that time, but just when we think we've kicked it, it comes back. ugh! emma has born the brunt of the sickness and it is sad to see my happy little girl so whiny and clingy. 

 in mid-december emma had a pretty bad cough (she had it for a couple of weeks around thanksgiving and finally kicked it...or so we thought. it made another appearance a week and a half later). normally i don't take my kids to the doctor for a cough since usually there's nothing they can do for it, but our nephew had just been diagnosed with croup and so i took her in just to be safe. i expected them to either say she had croup or more likely just say it was a virus and there was nothing they could do. suddenly the doctor started talking about possible asthma and before i knew it she was doing a nebulizer treatment (and boy was she pissed. honestly, it felt like i was torturing her. she was crying and i was on the verge of tears...and trying to calm logan who was upset by the whole thing). so we came home and this became our routine every 4 hours the first night. luckily she got used to them quickly.  

 i still wasn't so sure about the whole asthma thing. it all seemed pretty premature (i didn't like the idea of my 20 month old being given steroids at the drop of a hat). and it turns out my actual pediatrician agreed with me (we didn't get to see her until a week later at a follow up appointment). 

2 days after we had been to the doctor emma was eating, wasn't able to keep anything down and hadn't had a wet diaper in awhile. after talking with the doctor on the phone (it was a sunday), emma and dave headed to the er. dave jokes that is the only place they seem to go on their daddy-daughter dates (this was their 4th er visit in her 20 months of life). she didn't have all the symptoms of dehydration, but they did give her a pill to help with the nausea and suddenly all she wanted was to eat and drink. she wasn't happy about us monitoring how much she got (only a little pedialyte every 10 minutes). 

 and she did get to have a popsicle for dinner (it wasn't easy for logan to understand why she got to have a popsicle for dinner and he had to eat real food. life's tough!). we happily stopped the nebulizer treatments after her er visit (they thought she was maybe having a bad reaction to it) and a day later i decided i was done giving her the steroid medicine. 

but poor emma wasn't in the clear after all that. the saturday before christmas we were with dave's extended family making christmas goodies. it was a lot of fun. however sunday night, little by little, everyone started getting the flu (seriously, almost everyone in every family). emma is the only one that has been affected in our immediate family (knock on wood), but the poor girl thew up once on sunday night and then again on wednesday night (all over me). all our family festivities were cancelled on christmas eve and christmas day, which was a bummer, but we made the best of it.

so there you have it. i am sick of sickness (and it's only december. ugh!). here's to hoping for a healthy start of 2013 and the return of my happy girl.