I don’t zinc so!

First off, E. is still crusty and uncomfortable. I’ve been scrubbing his face and applying the topical antibiotic twice a day, which is very unpleasant for both him and me. Yesterday I thought it might be improving a little, but today it’s still pretty bad. Last night he kept waking up every few hours, writhing in discomfort. I’m going to take him the to pediatrician again tomorrow. Before they said that they would want to run a blood test for a zinc deficiency if it’s lasted a week which, barring a miracle, it looks like it will. If they can’t figure it out, I just snagged an appointment with the only pediatric dermatologist in the region for the 28th. Having the appointment is reassuring because if tomorrow the pediatrician isn’t sure what it is, the dermatologist most likely figure it out. And if it goes away before the 28th, then I can cancel my appointment with no charge. So today I’m feeling less discouraged. We’ll see what the doctor says tomorrow. I want to thank everyone for their support – I really appreciate it!

Speaking of support, my boss is very understanding and has been great. She has two little kids, I think about 7 and 5, and her husband just got sent back to Iraq for another year-long tour of duty. I don’t know how she does it. She’s been very helpful and reassuring about any new-mom worries I have. Anyway, last week I was getting pretty overwhelmed by work (and E.’s condition) and then she wanted me to make a new project my top priority even though I was pretty busy with my monthly reports. It just totally overwhelmed me. I ended up talking to her about it on Thursday and she apologized for dumping too much on me when I was already busy with my reports. And then on Friday, these were delivered with a lovely note.

How sweet is that?

Tonight’s the last day of woodworking class and if all goes well, I’m going to be bringing the armoire home tonight. I first have to get it lacquered during class, though. Keep your fingers crossed for me. Pictures to follow!

Rash Watch ’08 Continues

I am thinking of switching to a new pediatrician. He said to call him in a week if E.’s condition hasn’t improved. It hasn’t improved at all and so I called the office this morning only to find out that the doctor is in Florida this week. Um, really? Why he didn’t bother to tell me that he was going to be out of town when I saw him last week?

Fortunately, this doctor is part of a large group practice. I called the nurse hot line they provide and the nurse is now checking with another doctor to see if he wants to prescribe a topical antibiotic as well. Apparently the bacteria are living under the yellow crusties on E.’s face and so it should help it if I scrub them off with antibacterial soap and then put this ointment on. I tried it this morning with some Neosporin. And do you know what I discovered? Babies with painful rashes don’t particularly like to have them scrubbed!

The nurse said that with impetigo it usually takes a full week for the scabs to go away. If they aren’t gone by Thursday, I think I’m going to take E. to a dermatologist.

*****************************UPDATE********************************
It seems like quite a few people find this entry searching for pictures of babies with impetigo. In case you don’t read the other entries, it turned out that E actually had eczema that was misdiagnosed as impetigo and consequently allowed to developed a secondary infection. It took over five visits to different doctors (including the only pediatric dermatologist in my state) before it was figured out. If you have a baby with a worsening rash like E had and your doctor hasn’t mentioned the possibility of eczema, I would definitely ask specifically about it and/or find a doctor with a fair amount of experience with skin disorders. At the time I didn’t know better and E suffered needlessly for almost a month.
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On an unrelated note, I think I’m going to start using my middle name when asked for a name by restaurants. We ordered some takeout over the weekend, and when I went to go pick it up there was confusion because on the phone they had misheard my name as “Stace.” Even though I spelled it out “F as in Frank, a-i-t-h.” When I got there it took over 5 minutes to sort it out. This morning the nurse also thought I said “Stace.” When asked for my name on the phone, I usually try and emphasize the F sound, but often to no avail. People even sometimes write it down as “Saith.” SAITH? I know that people in Utah are used to hearing all sorts of weird names, but Saith? C’mon!


Better and Worse

Hopefully Better
So what do yout think about the new template? I hope it loads okay. Sometimes the background graphics on the old one would stall a bit on me which I found annoying. I’m still tinkering with this template a little, but then again I love to tinker. My blogroll disappeared when I switched over for reasons I don’t understand and the info at the bottom of each post is in a tiny font that needs to be changed, etc… But it will get there eventually. (And by then I’ll be sick of this design and want a new one!)

Unfortunately Worse
On the rash front, it’s been looking worse since I posted those pictures of him. So yesterday I took him to the doctor. We’ve been there so many times that I know the nurse by name (Hi, Melissa!) Anyway, E. has (drumroll please)…impetigo! It probably started as a rash from his drooling/penicillin allergy but now it’s infected. So he has to be on oral antibiotics again, which I was a little upset about. I just feel badly that he’s been on antibiotics almost every month. I asked the doctor if a topical antibiotic would work, and he said that it wouldn’t be very effective. So now E.’s on cefinir. When I picked up the prescription, the pharmacist told me that cefinir is 8% related to penicillin and so to watch E. for an allergic reaction. Isn’t there some antibiotic that is 0% related to penicillin that they could prescribed?

I whine a lot, but I know that many many kids have much more serious health problems. I’m very grateful that in general E. is a very healthy baby. But with all that said, these minor things one after another wear me out a little.

Project Update 5: Armoire

This week has gone by very quickly – it’s hard to believe that it’s time to go to woodworking again tonight. Here are some pictures from last week. Last week I glued the face frame onto the cabinet and also cut the lumber for the doors to size and sanded them.

First I applied wood glue to the entire surface of the cabinet where the face frame will be attached. (Wood glue is super strong. Once it’s completely dry, wood glue is stronger than wood.)
A close-up of my lovely glue-applying technique:

Then I laid the face frame down on the cabinet and started clamping them together. My instructor helped with this part. The face frame is somewhat flexible and to ensure a good fit to the box we would clamp it in one spot, tug the next bit into place, and then clamp it again.


After I got the clamps set up, I measured and cut the stiles and rails for my doors. Tonight I have to rout out grooves in the stiles and rails so I can add the panels and glue the doors together. Then I need to sand the doors smooth, drill the holes for the adjustable shelves, apply a wood laminate edge to the adjustable shelves, and maybe add some molding to the top of the armoire–you know, if there’s time. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get all of that done tonight, but I’m going to try my hardest!

Letter: Month Five

Dear E,

Over the weekend you turned 5 months old. Continuing the trend of your young life, month five was a veritable parade of minor ailments. Luckily, none of them were very serious. You picked up a strep skin infection on a very, um, delicate area (possibly from your 4-month checkup) and the antibiotics you were prescribed cleared up the infection but also triggered an allergic reaction. You broke out in crazy hives all over your chest, arms, and legs.


So at only five-months old you are now the proud owner of a pencillin allergy! To celebrate I thought about ordering you one of those dorky medical alert bracelets, but I don’t think they come in your size.

This last month was a good one for dressing you up in holiday-themed outfits: St. Patrick’s day and Easter were less than a week apart this year. I’m pretty sure that the pictures I took of you as a bunny are going to come in quite handy if a need for embarassing baby photos ever arises–like when you’re a smart-alecky teenager and you have a cute girl over at the house.

You’ve passed some developmental milestones this month. You can roll from your tummy onto your back and have gotten quite good at holding things in your hands. You LOVE to blow spit bubbles and have developed quite a rash on your chin from drooling so much.

This month we also saw first sign of your sense of humor. One night I was nursing you and chatting with your dad and we started laughing at a shared joke. And out of nowhere, you started laughing too (even though you were still eating)! And you were laughing hard. You wanted to be in on the joke. This of course made your dad and me crack up even more and so you started laughing harder too. You were almost hysterical with laugher and then suddenly it was too much and you got freaked out and the laughing turned to crying. But you quickly calmed down. It was one of my favorite moments with you so far. You laugh quite often, but this was the first time that you laughed not because we were interacting with you but because you wanted to interact with us. You bring so much laugher into our lives.

Love,

Mama

Let’s not do anything rash

E.’s been having a little bit of a tough time this week, but I’m not sure why. He’s been very tired, but will only take short naps. And last night he woke up crying at 3am, which is very unusual. After I got him back to sleep, he work up again at 6am and would NOT be consoled. The only thing that worked was swaddling him and letting him sleep in his swing. So I did that and slept on the couch next to him.

And the rash! Ever since his allergic reaction to the antibiotics, he’s had a rash on his face that won’t go away. The nurse said that it was because of his frequent drooling and to put some hydrocortisone cream on his chin, which I’ve been doing but it hasn’t helped that much. To top it off, E. has started rubbing his eyes with gusto whenever he’s tired, which is quite often. It’s painful to watch because he basically claws at his eyes, pumping his hands open and closed. I swaddle him when I put him to bed so he can’t scratch at his eyes.

Even though he’s not feeling well, he still tries hard to be cheerful. It’s cute in a pitiful sort of way.


Does anyone have any tips about how to end the rash or the eye rubbing?

Project: bookshelf with fabric backing

I am trying to organize and decorate the house. Progress is coming along slowly but surely. The books stacked on the floor in our bedroom needed a home and so I bought a Billy bookcase from IKEA. The white bookcases are about $20 cheaper than the other colors and so I went with white. But I wanted to spice it up a little and so I bought some fabric to cover the bookcase backing with. This was a test run: if it turned out well I was going to do the same thing to the bookcases I’m going to get for the home office.

(I took pictures of the process but I’m having trouble getting the slideshow to embed correctly. If you click on the image below, the slideshow will open in a new window.)


The Billy shelves from IKEA work well for this because they have a groove for the cardboard to slide into so you can’t see it from the side. The first time I tried to slide in the cardboard after stapling around the edges, the fabric bunched up and it wouldn’t fit. So I used spray adhesive to smooth out the fabric on the back and it worked a lot better. A couple of the staples do show through on the front, but they’re hard to see. Next time I’m going to be sure to put all of the staples really close to the edge so they don’t show.

What happened to “out like a lamb?”


I guess the saying sadly doesn’t apply to Utah. This morning the wind was roaring around our house so loudly that it woke me up a few times. And before I even got out of bed I knew that the roads were bad because I could heard the cars’ wheels crunching on the ice as people dove off to work.

Sigh. Spring is SUCH a tease.

I haven’t taken any new pictures of E. since Easter, but here’s an animated gif (aw, yeah! animated gifs–rocking it in style circa 1999!) I made from pictures of him wriggling around in bed. He’s a squirmy worm.

Yesterday I spent some time mucking around with a new blog template. I like this blue background but I thought it would be fun to change it up a little. Hopefully it will be finished sometime this week.

Project Update 4: Armoire

Class went pretty well on Wednesday. One of the reasons I enjoy taking this class is that it gives me access I wouldn’t otherwise have to expensive professional grade tools. On Wednesday, I used a couple of these tools to put together the face frame of the armoire. The face frame is attached to the front of the armoire to give it stability and a nice finished look.

First I cut the pieces I needed to exact size and lightly sanded them using the huge belt sander at the shop.
Then I drilled pocket screw holes in the ends of the cross pieces. This machine, shown below, is really neat. It similtaniously drills a hole in the end of the piece of wood and also routes out an angled hole so you can drill a screw into the wood and it won’t poke out of the board.

Then I screwed the cross pieces (putting glue on the ends) to the side pieces and ta-da, we have a face frame!

The last step was sanding the face frame smooth. For that I again used the huge belt sander in the shop. I LOVE this machine. The face frame is really wide, about 41 inches (it barely fit in the sander) and it would have been really difficult to sand it smooth by hand. This sander is also great for sanding tabletops and things like that.


Well, that’s all I got accomplished this last week. There are only 3 more weeks of class left! I’m going to have to modify my original design if I want a chance of finishing on time. I’m not going to make drawers any more; I’m just going to make two long doors and have shelves inside. With the change in my plans, I’ll hopefully be able to finish on time. I guess we’ll see!

Food Fight

Things have been pretty quiet so far this week. I’m almost over a bad cold I’ve had since last week but N. is just coming down with it now. E. seems to have escaped it so far and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll be able to go a couple of weeks without suffering from some ailment.

Here’s a Youtube video that N. showed me. It’s pretty amazing. It’s a stop motion film depicting wars and conflicts from WWII to the present, using the foods of the countries involved. (Watch for the North Korean kimchi versus South Korean kimchi around 1:45.) There’s a guide to the foods and the countries they represent here. Apparently the film was written, directed, and animated in 3 months by just one guy, Stefan Nadelman. And all of the food used was eaten by Stefan or his dog so none went to waste!

On another note, I have woodworking class tonight. Hopefully I’ll be able to make some good progress because there are only a couple weeks of class left. Yikes!