summer update

[sanpaku_backup]

I had pink eye over the weekend and went to get medicine for it yesterday -- the Mrs. is out of town, and the bus lines are complicated, so I ended up walking ~2 miles to get there ($50 when all is said and done for something that anyone can diagnose themselves). It was a misty, pneumonia-weather type day, and while I know there can't be any connection in the fact, I am so freaking sick right now. The chills and the headaches came on suddenly around 6 pm last night and since then I've been stuck to the couch, sleeping and watching bad TV. When you're afraid to go to the bathroom because the cold of getting off the couch seems unbearable -- that kind of thing.

This always seems to happen when the fam goes away -- I look forward to the millions of things I will get done around here that do in fact desperately need to be done. Most urgently, I have to settle on and copy readings for this goddam class, which will entail going downtown to campus. Also my office is a catastrophic mess, the result of immersion in a stupid work project that I'll describe in frnds-only, perhaps.

Being here alone is boring but probably well-timed in that there's no way I could do much in the way of child-care. That doesn't prevent the Mrs. from making noises about coming back, becuase -- surprise, surprise -- her family isn't helping out much with the kids. We're in Groundhog Day territory with this, it's happened so many times, but she keeps going thee with the idea that hands will be outstretched to take a screaming infant. Maybe it's because they keep telling her it will be like that, hm...

Being on the couch all day also allows me to watch Phoebe all day (she's dog non grata after too many accidents in their house). The answer is -- nothing. She curls up in her little bed and comes out to eat and to be let out about once a day. Lazy dogs, Italian Greyhounds... she needs to start pulling her weight around here.

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The summer has been, um, challenging in whole new ways. The last time I updated about everything, Henny Penny was a pill about being put down, and generally exhausting. He's gotten better about sitting by himself, especially outside, so that one can actually relax a little with him. He is, dare one say, almost easy.

So with an almost perfect inverse curve, Jo has been very hard to deal with. Starting about early June, the eczema really picked up badly. In addition to plenty of ambient scratching, she would have 1 and often 2 attacks per day of 30-60 minutes of scratching the living hell out of herself, catatonic at first and then crying. This was accompanied by a real uptick in awful behavior -- bossiness, tantrums, shrieking. There was a point at which it could be shrugged off as getting older, or being sick, or whatever, but we are well beyond that now. It could well be her sensing weakness (how effectively can you intervene in her behavior with a baby on your shoulder, anyway), or it could just be her way of respnding to the baby, though she hasn't ever shown hostility to him. She says, over and over again, that she's scared, which we don't know how to interpret -- a kid who was scared of nothing whatsoever until about last March or so.

Things reached a low point a couple of weeks ago when we couldn't go out for breakfast because she had a tantrum/scratchfest right there on the sidewalk, then pitched the same thing when we went to the zoo a few hours later. (Why did the animatronic dinosaur robots have to have gigantic teeth? And be right next to the gift shop? Psychological whiplash between pure terror and wishes denied.) This was followed by an hour-and-a-half long scratching tantrum shrieking horrorfest. This is just not the Jo we are used to. Our kid has turned into That Kid who everyone hates being in a public place with, as humiliating for us as it is baffling.

The dermatologist had her on her fourth set of antihistamines -- basically, back in the day, when kids had bad eczema, they would hospitalize them and dope them up so they were too tired to itch. To my mind this is strange because the only correlation I can find between her itching and any other "trigger" is her being tired -- she didn't get enough sleep, or she's at a low point in the day. Then he was away on vacation and we were tearing our hair out. So we called the pediatrician and she prescribed prednisolone (steroid) for two weeks. It's not something you want to give a kid for a long time, but it cleared up the eczema instantly.

She then got sick again, but at least we have been able to see what she's like when she's not clawing her skin off. There are times when she's been her old self, and there are times when she's bratty, but the past couple of weeks have seemed more manageable. All the harder it is to see the scratching slowly start to reappear as the dosage declines.

So, that's been our summer. We really, really need her to turn the corner on all this, because it is so debilitating and it is driving us insane.

Comments

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

My sympathies.

I was wondering if you guys had any luck with the methods in "The Happiest Baby on the Block." So far it's been recommended by 2 people I know, and I haven't yet heard from anyone who says it doesn't work.

I wonder if 2 years old is the magic age for mammals. (That's Jo's age, yes?) Both my dogs got weird when they were about 2. Then it cleared up after a while. :P

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I dunno if we used that one -- S. was convinced by "Babywise" and we did pretty well by that. I guess it's been a while since I looked at all the books. I'll ask S. when she gets home.

Jo is 3 and a half -- we really never had "terrible twos" with her. I mean, she was more challenging and all, but generally good-natured. So that makes the way she is now even harder -- we thought we had done a "good job" or something.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Oh! Now I remember where I heard the title. A few months ago we had Henry at the pediatrician's and he was showing us a swaddling method from that book, which he recommended. It's definitely a good idea to find and practice some tight swaddling techniques -- will buy you some seriously improved nursing and sleeping time in the first couple of months.