Sick Amelia

Here is a picture of Amelia, Yoda and Emma. If you think Emma looks a little sickly that is OK. She is a plastic doll.

Here is a picture of Amelia and Heidi from Tuesday evening. Amelia is normally running around like crazy at the point in the day. As you can she--she has been a little bit off.

This picture was taken 2 seconds after the first. This shows clear proof that she is sick. Normally she moves 5-10 times in a 2 second period. If you look closely you can discern a small amount of movement in her feet and eyes.

I think this counts as Amelia's first real illness. She has been a little sick for 1 or 2 day periods but nothing like this. She has a fever, she sometimes shakes with the chills and last night was up all night. And both of her ears are infected.

One fun thing that we have heard she inherited from her Aunt Becky is a dislike of medicine. Even the sickly sweet pink kind that they have for amoxycillin now. And now they have these little syringes that allow you to squirt the medicine right into the back of their throat. I tried this earlier in the day. The nurse on call told us to squirt it in and then hold her mouth shut. Like all medical suggestions for toddlers--good in theory--not so great in practice. I squirted in the medicine and held her mouth shut tight. After about 10 seconds I felt so bad for the little thing that I had to let her mouth go. Pink liquid spewed forth. Most of it got on my hand but some of it also dropped on Yoda. (When giving a child medicine it is sometimes helpful to place a 100 lb. dog underneath. ) I reached 5 feet away to get a towel to wipe the family down and when I turned around Amelia was scraping her tongue clean and shaking her hand out on the carpet. For the record, Yoda still has a pink spot on his nose.

We called back and the nurse suggested putting the medicine in chocolate syrup. Can you see where this is going? I one upped the nurse and bought both syrup and iced cream. If you want to stop over we now have a dish of chocolate syrup with amoxycillin and a bowl of iced cream with amoxycillin. You will leave free of parasites.

For any of the big time worriers out there--she seems to be in pretty good spirits and the nurses that we have called (4 times today) keep telling us that by the time we are on our 7th kid we won't even call about things like this. I hope so.

Late Breaking News: Amelia has "gone to the bathroom" 4 times in the last hour. This is not only fun for us but necessitated one more call to the nurse. Her response, "Yes, that can happen."