Monday, September 19, 2005

He's all better!

Well, Conor is doing much better now. He woke up on Saturday morning and didn't have a temperature. What a huge relief! Allie had a Soccer game on Saturday, but I did not take Conor with me because it was quite chilly that morning and I didn't want to risk him getting sick again. So he went with his Daddy to get "do-dos" (donuts) and visit Grand Dad while we went to the game.

Allie's team was defeated, 3-1, but they did try very hard. Allie played goalie most of the time, a little over 1/2 of the game, and she stopped a LOT of the goals that were attempted. She plays goalie very well. After the game I took her and Ashley (one of her best friends) to the coffee shop I frequent. Neil (one of the owners) has never met Allie, and he knows Conor quite well, so he wanted me to bring Allie in to meet him. They do serve Fruit Smoothies, so Allie did not have to get coffee. :) As Neil is from England, he has an accent that is wonderful to listen to, and Allie and Ashley enjoyed meeting him.

Later that day, Jeff decides that we should go up to Young's Dairy in Yellow Springs so that we can play "Utter's and Putter's" (miniature golf), pet the animals, and get some ice cream. The kids enjoyed it, and Conor loved feeding the goats! We also saw dairy cows, calves, and sheep. We played miniature golf, with Conor hitting his ball, then picking it up and putting it right next to the hole and putting it in. Needless to say, he won. Hee hee. He didn't like the last hole, where you put the ball in but you do not get it back! He was not done playing after all! But then we went for the ice cream, so he was OK after that. He got the blue "cotton candy" flavored ice cream, and got it all over his face and hands! After that, he was tired and ready to go home. We visited the goats one last time, washed our hands, and went home. Conor fell asleep in the car on the way home, and stayed asleep until Sunday morning.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

"It's a nice day"....

Those are the words that Conor says to me every morning. And it continues until the sun goes down. "It's a nice day, Mommy!" With big smiles. One day this week, on our way to the coffee shop, the sun was big and orange. Conor saw it in the sky and said "Look, Mommy, there's a balloon!" At first I didn't know what he was talking about, I thought I just couldn't see it. (I was driving after all and couldn't see which direction he was pointing! :)) But then it was right in front of us, out the windshield, and he pointed again and said "Balloon, Mommy!"

I laughed and said, "That's the sun, it sure is orange right now!" To which he disagreed. It was NOT the sun, it was a balloon! :) I let it go. It did look like a balloon. So I just agreed that it was pretty.

Another thing he does, is when he refers to yesterday he says "last day". It's always "last day we went to Grandma's house" or he also says "last day was nice, too!". These are things that he has been saying for a while now. One new thing he does is say "I'm happy, mommy!" He has been saying that for about a week now.

But last night he wasn't feeling so well. I asked him if he felt bad and he said yes. Then I guess he thought about it a little bit and he all of a sudden said "I'm not bad, Mommy."

"Of course you're not bad, sweetie, I just meant that you didn't feel good."

I took his temperature and the reading was 103.5. I was shocked. I thought for sure it must me wrong. But I knew he had a temperature, so I gave him some Tylenol, covered him up, and let him watch cartoons. About 30 minutes later, I took his temp again. 104. I thought surely there must be something wrong with this thermometer! So I went and got a different one, and took his temperature with another one. It was a digital one and was climbing - when it reached 103, Conor was impatient with it, so I had to remove it. But it told me that the other one was not that off. So I called his doctor. It was almost 10 pm, so of course I got the answering service. But the doctor on call called me back within about 10 minutes. She said to keep fluids in him, cold ones, and alternate Tylenol and Motrin every 3 hours. Also to keep a cold rag on his forehead, and if his temperature reached 104.5 to take him to the emergency room immediately. She also said with temperatures that high, it most likely is a virus causing it. Viruses cannot live in high temperature, so that is what your body does to kill the virus. He also might start having seizures, she tells me. And although she said it would be scary, it would be normal with his temperature that high. Scary isn't a strong enough word for it.

I have never experienced anyone having a temp that high, I don't think. Allie's had gotten up to 102.something when she was little, and the Dr told me that I had to get it down - to put her in a cool bath and all that. She screamed and cried when I did that (the bath). But the Dr I talked to last night didn't seem too fazed by the number. She said it would not hurt him unless it reached 105. She did also tell me to put him in a "tepid" bath to cool him down if the other stuff didn't work. But the other stuff brought it down to 102, so I just kept that up. I didn't want to do the bath thing.

So needless to say, I didn't go to work today. Conor still got up this morning and said "It's a nice day, Mommy!" although he still didn't feel well. We read books, watched cartoons, talked, played with blocks, and mostly spent the day relaxing.

All day, I alternated Tylenol and Motrin, and his temperature stayed around 99. So I thought I would see if I quit giving him the medicine if it would stay down. So I tested it. About 4 - 5 hours after a dose, I checked his temperature and it was up to 101.8. So I gave him the medicine. I checked again near the next dose, and it was 101.1. And the last time was around 10 or so tonight and it was at 102.2. So, it does not seem to be going away in the 24 hours that I thought it would!

Hopefully tomorrow will be better for him. I am keeping him home again tomorrow, I do not want to send him to the sitters when he isn't feeling well. So he will have the weekend to recover and get back up to 100%. I am certain that tomorrow will be a "nice day" and I will hear about it as soon as it is light outside. :)

Good night!

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Rough day

Wow, today was a long one. For starters, Allie missed the bus. Not through any fault of her own, the bus driver for some reason has been early a couple of times this year, and today was one of them. The bus is supposed to arrive at the stop at 7:03 am according to the "schedule". Well, we discovered that that was not the correct time around the second or third day. So Allie started leaving for the bus stop @ 6:45 am (it is only maybe a 2-3 minute walk), and she said that most days she had to wait for the bus. This morning, she left at 6:45 and came back at 6:55 because the kids were all gone and she had already missed it. So I had to try to rush to get myself and Conor ready, but I already knew she wasn't going to make it on time. School starts @ 7:20 and the traffic around the school is HORRIBLE. Stop and go, everyone trying to drop their kid off. So She got there around 7:30. When I arrived at work, I called the bus garage to register a complaint. If you have a bus stop in a subdivision where kids have to walk to the bus stop, don't be more than 5 minutes early. I mean come on!

So anyway, not the best way to start my morning. But not too bad. But the real fun began with someone at work not doing their job properly. This person works in our Corporate office, and not only made a smart remark directed at our "branch" (aka Jean and myself), but repeatedly made the same mistake with one call. I will not go into deep details, no one would know what I was talking about. :) So I went and talked to my boss about the situation and he told me to email her and copy him on it, and explain the situation to her. So I did.

Well, her response was to copy her boss, my boss, and my boss's boss and write a big long email about the mistakes that the "Dayton branch" made with this call. Every single thing she wrote in the email could be proven wrong by our internal system. She does not know the system well enough to know this, but oh how I wanted to tell her. As soon as that email was received, and read, my boss yells "Kate - don't respond to that!" He does know me very well. I had already started my response. And it would have made her look like the incompetent jerk that she was (and still is). But NO. Can't do that. Can't stir the corporate pot, so to speak. Just let it go, I was told, don't let it get to me. It's just a job, I shouldn't get so upset about it. So I walked out the door and walked around the building to "cool off". I had the facts on my side, and I had proof of her mistakes (not ours), but I wasn't allowed to defend what she said. Grrrrrr! I do care about my job, I care about doing a good job. But that is not something that matters in a corporate world. And I do understand where my boss is coming from. He is a lot like me - not the type to keep his mouth shut (so to speak) and he has been given the "Corporate" line so many times that it burns him out, too. "We don't know what is "best" for the company." To be quite honest, as many times as the people running this company have been switched around, the do not know what is "best" for the company. They do not even know how our system works. Or how to look up a call in our internal system.

It just burns me up that companies would rather do things the wrong way than to learn how, or teach their employees how to do something correctly. Corporate would never admit that they were wrong. So what would be the outcome? I would just look bad for "exchanging emails" in a negative light. Blabbity blah. So my boss sends her a "nice" email wanting her to send us written documentation on how this should have been handled so that there aren't any mistakes in the future. Oh, how that goes through me.

So I vented to one of my co-workers via email. My go-to guy for when something is bothering me... :) And his response will forever be one of the best "pick me up" emails that I have ever received. It made me feel tons better. But my day didn't get better.

I left earlier than usual for lunch because I wanted to get my dog some chew stuff and get home to let him in the house. I had left him out that morning because he has become quite the little chewer and I was tired of cleaning up messes when I came home. His latest project is the door frame at the front door. He also, during the night, got a plastic cup from out of his food bag and tore it to bit in the living room. Didn't bother with the FOOD that was in the bag. No... just the cup. So I figured it would not hurt him to be outside for 1/2 day, in the morning when it wasn't very hot. I put his water and food out for him.

So I went to the tractor supply store to see what kind of chewies they might have. I got several! I also asked if there was something to deter pets from chewing on things. I was directed to a spray that is used for horses to quit chewing. It is not harmful at all to any animal, just a really bitter taste to make them stop. So I got that, too.

I backed into my driveway and when I looked into my mirror, I saw my neighbor standing at the edge of my back yard, seemingly talking to my dog. Groan! What had he done now? Was he barking all day, what? So I went through the house and out the back door and of course, the dog had wrapped himself around my hammock in the back yard. That dog can get stuck on a 3 inch bush coming out of the ground. And that is no exaggeration, he does it all the time. So my neighbor proceeded to tell me that the dog had been able to reach her tree in her yard and had dug all the mulch from under it and messed up the grass around it. And yes, I could see that he had! I apologized profusely and she said it was OK, but she would appreciate it if we would shorten his leash so he couldn't do it any more. Done.

I will have to bake her something and send it over to apologize again. Had I not been on my lunch break (and wearing a skirt), I would have tried to fix it for her then! So I took him back in the house, put 4 different kinds of chewies out for him (bone, rawhide, chicken flavored something, and something else) that I had just bought. Then I sprayed all the door frames and base boards that were accessible by him. I made sure there wasn't ANYTHING available for him to chew on, and closed all the doors, then I headed back to work.

The afternoon was not as bad, but I was just worn out and drained, so it was a struggle to be there. I did my work and got out of there. 5:00, OUT THE DOOR. Picked up Conor, went home, sat out back on my hammock for a bit with Conor. The tree was already fixed, and it wasn't as bad as I thought. The grass wasn't messed up, it just looked that way with all the mulch in it. Either she or her husband had fixed it. Now I definitely need to do something to make up for it. The rest of the evening is uneventful. We eat, play, dance.... (OK it was just Conor dancing to the theme song from the season premier of one of my favorite shows - Gilmore Girls), then everyone is ready for bed. I am writing this and yawning at this time. But I thought since I hadn't written in here for a while, I would put a bit of an update on here.

Well it is off to bed for me! I have actually been going to bed quite early since school started. And, um, yeah, 11 is early compared to before. :)

Here's hoping for a better day tomorrow! For everyone! Good night!

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Cool Dude....



Conor has a little "motor cycle" that he absolutely loves. He rides it around the house, outside, everywhere. We were goofin' off the other night and I put Jeff's do-rag (or whatever you call it!) on his head. He looked so cute! I was taking pictures of him and he just had to have me take one of "just the motor cycle, Mommy!" So, of course, I had to. :) Here are a couple of the pictures. You can see his tonsils in one picture! And his "blankie" is never too far away! :)