What a day

I am already behind on posts...a "March happenings" post will have to come in a bit with birthday bits, concert chaos, and dental details (fun alliterations, eh), but for today, I'm just going to focus on today.

* To start off, the weather today was WONDERFUL!!! Beautiful skies, fluffy clouds, great weather. We spent a lot of time outside today just because.

We are learning about Plymouth colonies, so we started our own ant colonies today in these great mini ant farms I found at Target. The kids and I have been transfixed on watching them dig. Owen's ants are already hard at work tunnelling, while Tig and Garrett's seem to be feeling full from the brownie bait we used to lure them into the farm. Owen's ants, by the way, were lured in with a half-eaten jelly bean, so we think that might have something to do with it since all the ants came from the same original colony.

* Teagan is $10 richer today and is walking on air because she had her first official, paid babysitting job :-) She watched two little girls - one a little older than Emmy, and one that is 6 months old - for 3 hours or so. We had gone over all her babysitting training info, filed out a sheet of emergency contact info and such for her to take, and she had a bag with baby dolls and books and other things she thought would entertain the little girls.

After Emmy was born she took a babysitting training class at the hospital and an infant CPR class, and her Activity Day leaders are AMAZING and had a wonderful class a few months ago to help prepare the girls to become babysitters, so she was plenty ready for today. (Not to mention all the on the job training she gets around the house!)

It was a big step for her, and for me...it was kind of tough to just leave her there; I mean, she's my first baby after all...and I just left her at someone else's house. But we both made it through it; and she is now $10 richer and I am one step closer to being able to share her more with the world. Baby steps :-)

* Tonight Garrett gave a great family home evening on Joseph Smith's First Vision which was one the last things he needed to do to earn his religious knot for scouts. He's helping out with a Primary function this weekend, and after than he will be able to get that patch at this month's pack meeting. He is really excited about that!

* Emmy is not feeling well again :-( I don't know what's up with him this time. According to his cycle fevers, he shouldn't be going into another cycle for two more weeks, but yesterday he felt slightly warm and was just under 100 all day. Then this afternoon he was up at 103 and around 7 he had another seizure. This one lasted for about 8 minutes and then it took him an hour and a half to recover from it before he could stand or keep his eyes open.

He's asleep on my lap right now with pink little cheeks, but his breathing is calmed down (when he is really hot he sort of *pants* breathing; during a seizure he only barely breaths -consequently turning blue during it; and after one he has a weird, short, labored breathing that he does for a long while) and the Ibuprofen I gave him brought his fever down to 101.7, so I think he is a little more comfortable now.

This kind of throws off my thoughts that his fevers were coming every 6 weeks. I've taken him in to the doctors the past couple of cycles to help establish some documentation about his fevers, but no one can seem to explain them. They don't have any other symptoms that come with them other than the fever and sometimes seizures. We've done blood work, urine tests, strep tests. Nothing seems outs of whack other than a baby that has a fever of 103+. (I think it was the last cycle, or maybe the one before, he got up to 106!) Now I am keeping a calendar of his fevers and symptoms that go along with them so that in a couple of cycles I can take it to an infection disease doctor to decipher. Our pediatrician thinks it could be one of two cyclic fever syndromes - the names of neither I remember because they were too long and too Latin-y.

So our very good, perfect weather, walking on clouds day ended with a sick little man, a worried mom, and the kids eating Cup-O-Soups for dinner and watching Veggie Tales Lord of the Beans. Which, for the older three, the last two probably made it the perfect ending for a perfect day! We'll see what fun tomorrow brings our way!