First Trip to the ER and Other Random Updates

This past weekend we took C to the ER for the first (and hopefully last!) time.  She had come down with a bug from being at the daycare center all day on Monday.  First it started out as a very green, snotty nose.  Then she developed a low grade fever, hovering between 100 and 101 degrees (we do underarm temps).  Then Thursday she started to get a tiny rash on her cheeks.  No big deal, she had this last winter and it was nothing more than dry skin.  Friday morning I put some Aquaphor lotion on her cheeks to clear it up.

Saturday morning when I went to get her out of bed I almost died of shock.  C's cheeks were BRIGHT red and the rash had spread upward to parts of her forehead.  She almost looked as though she had suffered second degree burns!  I posted a picture of her on Facebook and some friends said it was food allergies, others said it could be scarlet fever or fifth disease.  C was pretty cranky all day and was losing her appetite a little.  When it looked as though the rash was starting to spread to her neck we decided to take her to the ER.

C's rash.  On the plus side you can see her teeth! (click to enlarge)

In 45 minutes we were in and out.  That had to be some sort of record as far as emergency room visits go!  The doctor said that it was just a rash in response to whatever viral bug C had.  She said that most babies gets rashes with viral infections but as we get older we tend to "outgrow" the rash part.  It's been 3 days since our visit to the ER and C's rash is almost gone.  I guess it was bound to happen: two overly concerned parents taking their kid to the emergency room over nothing.  Ah well.

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This is my 400th published post (415th in all).  Yay me!

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Brandon is getting out of the military in less than 14 months and plans to finish his engineering degree.  So guess who's going to be the bread winner in this family?  You got it...C.  Just kidding, obviously it will be me.  But since I have no hope of making as much as Brandon is making right now and we have NO clue how much health insurance is going to cost us we have decided to sock away a significant amount of savings to help supplement our income for three years.  Hopefully it won't take Brandon 3 full years to finish his degree but we added a little buffer in case it does or in case it takes a while for him to find a job.  Our magic number for savings is $23,000.   That amounts to about $650 per month for 36 months.  At the beginning of October our savings balance was.....$60.  We're now  up to $2,000 so we've got 14 more months to save the remaining $21,000.  Plus a little extra for our trip to Disney World and new tires for both sets of vehicles.  Think it's impossible?  Not for me.  I can sniff out savings better than a pig looking for truffles and Brandon is thisclose to pitching our craptastic DVR out the window and cancelling our cable TV with Comcast.  It's gonna get done.

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I just realized today that almost all of my articles on the sidebar had expired links from when Associated Content was bought out by Yahoo.  So I've spent the past few hours going through old blog posts and checking all my links to make sure everything is up to date.  It's still a work in progress.  If I've linked anything in the past that is now broken please let me know.  I hate to be *that* blogger that has crappy links all over the place.  That and I like to think that people still read older posts from my blog.

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I'm in the process of writing up an article about saving money on Christmas shopping.  I just have one more thing to buy C (a new car seat) and I will be DONE for her Christmas and birthday shopping!  Though I'm woefully behind on planning for her birthday party which is only 2 months away.  I really need to get started on that.  At least I made a Pinterest board.  That's a start!

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Lastly, please stop by Holly's blog and offer up some prayers and positive vibes.  Her water broke at 17 weeks with one of her twins and she's trying desperately to carry them another 42 days until she hits 24 weeks.  She could definitely use as much support from the ALI community as possible! 

Not One But Two.....

Milestones! Teeth! Blog posts in one week!

Yesterday I saw them, two little white dots on the bottom of C's gums.  I couldn't feel anything but decided I would keep an eye on them.  This morning I felt her gums with my finger and felt it!  A sharp little tooth had broken through!  Though it's no more visible than it was yesterday.  I expect its neighbor will arrive any day now.

And now here's a little video of C's other milestone which she accomplished on Tuesday and is now her favorite thing to do.

9 Months and Other Updates

This past Saturday marked C's 9 month...birthday? Whatever it is you call it. A milestone I guess.  Now that she's mobile and thisclose to walking she seems like a happier baby.  Maybe it's because she can physically get away from strangers she doesn't like or maybe it's just because the world doesn't seem so scary now that she's had time to explore more of it.  She's developed some weird obsessions, the latest one being shoelaces.  Particularly my shoelaces.  Other obsessions include: my coffee mug, my coupon book, the bathroom scale and the opening intro music for the Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report.  C is still eating pureed foods because she still has NO TEETH, even though we might only be days away from seeing the first one.  Of course I said that months ago and we still have NO TEETH.  Still, we may have had a breakthrough in the self-feeding department.  This past week she held a Baby Mum Mum for the first time and stuck it in her mouth.  So far it's been the only thing she'll stick in her mouth, though today we're going to try frozen yogurt drops and see how that goes.  I don't think I'll buy another box of the Baby Mum Mums now that I discovered they were made in China.  Something about baby food made in China just kinda weirds me out a bit.

My sisters and I are still working on my dad's estate which will probably take a while.  We have multiple properties to sell and he didn't exactly take good care of them.  As in, there were no doors to the bathrooms or bedrooms in his house and he had a mild case of hoarding.  But at least that didn't reflect in the legal side of his life because he kept all his paperwork and documents carefully organized.  Thank God!  In a few weeks I plan to go back and visit to help clean up his estate and I know it's going to be a very depressing trip for me.  Because my dad always lived far away it's been easy for me to convince myself that he's not really dead.  However it's hard to avoid that fact when I'm sitting in his house going through his things.

I've toyed around with the idea of shuttering Fearlessly Infertile.  Not because I don't think anyone reads this space but because I don't really have that much to talk about.  At least not things that would count as informative or inspiring or even interesting.  I do love writing and I though about just maintaining my travel blog instead, or starting a Fearlessly Frugal blog.  I'm still debating what to do about this space.

And now for the pictures.  I wanted to wait until I shared these pictures with our birthmom first.  For some reason I just don't feel comfortable posting pictures of C until I've posted them to her share site first.  The Adoption Day pictures were taken by my friend Suzanne from Ginger Snaps Pictures.  I simply love how they turned out and that she was able to Photoshop all the snot off C's face from her terrible cold.