24 Weeks and Counting

Still no pictures (I actually just uploaded about a hundred new photos to my now-back-from-the-lovely-computer-tech-support-folks MacBook but, much to my chagrin, my iPhoto program has been disappeared in the process. The good news is that the machine is working correctly and I got a system upgrade from Panther to Leopard in the process but now have to make a decision about uploading the old iLife suite I bought a couple of years ago [once I find the disks] or upgrading to the new suite or finding another program that runs on a Mac altogether). Anyway, it's too late at night for such tasks, but I didn't want to fail to post today.

Today Sharon reached 24 weeks. We're now, technically speaking, at 24 and 1 day. And counting. We're still at that point in the pregnancy where every day counts, but meanwhile we are counting our blessings about reaching this far with the new baby. Sharon is enjoying every kick and punch (and she does seem to kick and punch a lot, but mostly at night when Sharon is trying in vain to sleep. Daytime and the kid naps. Great. This may be a harbinger of things to come).

And, as if she's in cahoots with her little sister, Hallie has been prepping us mightily for this task of all-night-marathon-sessions for much of this week. Hallie came down with a fever on Tuesday (was probably getting sick as early as Sunday, when she began to exhibit a pronounced lack of desire even for her favorite foods and she began what we think of as the great eating and drinking strike of October 2008) and was pretty sick on Wednesday and Thursday. What we thought might be either strep throat or a urinary tract infection (they check a baby's urine by taping a plastic bag around the kid's middle and waiting for him or her to pee. Hallie greeted this particular indignity with a bout of vomiting on the nurse practitioner. You gotta hand it to her: even if she does not speak much she does make her opinion well known). Both tests came back negative, so it was probably just a case of pharyngitis or mild tonsillitis (her tonsils were inflamed and had some pus around them). Anyway, she was utterly miserable for most of the week and has been consistently waking up from naps and sleep and crying uncontrollably. None of the usual tricks to stop this crying have worked at all, and no amount of holding, rocking, singing, mentioning of Elmo and Ernie, book reading, or anything else we like to do around here made her feel any better. While we were able to get at least 10 ounces of fluid in her every day, Hallie seemed particularly averse to taking her bottle and her consumption of super charged goat milk -- on Wednesday she had 1 ounce, on Thursday, 4 ounces, and Friday, 7 ounces. Today she managed to take in 15 ounces and we did a few happy dances over that. Her normal quantity is closer to 20, plus a bunch of food. So clearly things have not been going too well. But we are hopeful that things are getting better and that our normal well-adjusted, much less whiny kid is on her way back into our lives.

The truly surprising thing is that, throughout all of this, there has been very little vomiting, so we are actually at 131 vomit free days of the year (presuming she does not choose to vomit if she wakes up in tears again tonight). We are grateful for this, and probably even more grateful for the fact that Hallie's lungs remained clear during this illness and that it wasn't worse than it was.

OK--once I figure out the picture program thing, I do promise to upload tons of pictures! Stay posted...it really should happen some time this week and that post is going to be a doozy because there is a lot of picture ground to cover.