The South Family: November 2008

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Christmas Tree

I made it almost 24 hours before Brynlie broke her first ornament!

Merrell Family Pictures

Kristi just posted several more family pictures from last month. Check them out here!

Brynlie's Quirks

Brynlie has discovered that she likes to sleep with her feet hanging out of her crib.

I am sorry about the long absence...it has been a busy couple of weeks. Vince is working on making our computer faster so I had to save all of our pictures on discs so that he could wipe the computer clean and install more RAM. That was a much bigger chore than I thought it would be. But I am so glad that all of our pictures are now safely preserved on discs should our computer decide to fail us. (Tangent...a few years back my mom asked for some pictures of the girls for a scrapbook she was working on. I was lazy and thought it would be easier to put all our pictures on discs for her instead of going through them and finding ones for her. Less than a week after doing this our computer crashed and we lost everything. If she hadn't asked me for those pictures we would have lost ALL of them. And I would still be crying. Now go, and save your pictures right now!!! My blog will be here to read when you are done.)

My other reason for not blogging is because we have had a houseful of sick children, with Brynlie ending up in the instacare THREE times in one week, plus a visit to our pediatrician. Kylie got sick a couple of weeks ago and she never gets sick so I knew it was bad. A week later I was sure that Sadie and Brynlie were going to miss this bug when they both were up all night coughing. So much for them missing the bug. Sadie wasn't too terribly sick, but Brynlie started wheezing and had a hard time breathing. It escalated quickly enough that I had to run her to the instacare late Monday afternoon. Here she is waiting in the doctor's office. The picture isn't important, just listen to her trying to breathe!

After two treatments with the nebulizer and x-rays to make sure it wasn't in her lungs they sent us home saying I needed to see her pediatrician the next day or else come back to the instacare. I was also told to not hesitate to take her to the ER if it got bad during the night. I still haven't paid my $350 bill for her stitches so I really didn't like that idea. It didn't get better that evening and started to get worse. So, about 9:30 we took her back to the instacare and they gave her another nebulizer treatment. The next day we saw our pediatrician who was concerned that she wasn't better than she was after the treatments and steroids. He prescribed an inhaler and said to come back the next day if she wasn't doing better. Wednesday and Thursday she improved and I thought we were done until she woke up Friday morning wheezing again. By Friday afternoon I was getting worried and called her pediatrician to find him out of town until TUESDAY. Of course...so back to the instacare we went. The doctor explained that she has bronchiolitis, similar to bronchitis, but the congestion is in the bronchioles. It was caused by a virus, mostly likely RSV, and she just needs to get all that mucus to loosen up. For a baby this is difficult since they don't fully understand coughing yet, and because their bronchioles are very tiny and tight. She is still wheezing badly enough that I skipped church today, but is slowly improving. We are running the humidifier 24/7 and she is taking lots of steamy baths and showers. The first few days with the inhaler were awful. I would have to sit on top of her so that I could pin her arms to her sides while I held it over her mouth. Today she has started to accept that this has to happen and it will be over quickly so she usually will do it willingly for the first couple of breaths. I do have to hold her hands down for the last few, but we are making huge progress!