Flying with children

We've flown with Allison before, but this is the first time that she's been old enough to get excited about the process. She's been watching the planes with Bryana and myself and getting excited about... well, she has no idea what she's excited about, but it sure is exciting. It really is a joy to watch.

Hopefully, shell sleep well on the plane.

Eric

Emergency rooms and sleepovers

I won't belabor the point, since there is enough emotion in taking a child to the emergency room in the first place that I don't want to relive too much by recounting it. At any rate, our youngest daughter - Allison - was having some trouble breathing and was taken, in turn, to an urgent care facility, to the emergency room (via ambulance) and finally admitted to the hospital all from about 4:00 in the evening on Saturday to about 9:00 at night. (The first hint that it might be serious was when we had only been in the exam room a couple minutes when we heard the doctor say to the nurse in the hall, "I'll see the toddler first." They almost never see you that quickly.) We were discharged just over 12 hours after being admitted to the hospital with a couple of prescriptions and an order to see her normal doctor within a week. All this time, Bryana had a birthday party to be at. That was fine at first, but with the party starting at 4:00 we started to wonder what we were going to do about the time Allison was being loaded into the ambulance.

Without me even asking, the mother of the birthday girl offered to put up Bryana for the night as soon as heard what was going on. And, as it just so happens, Bryana has been bugging us for about six months or so to let her do a sleep over. We keep telling her that she'd have to wait for her next birthday, but this was a perfect opportunity for us to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. We were able to focus on Allison (and trade off sleeping in the hospital room) and we didn't have to worry about Bryana's well being at the same time.

I'm pretty sure that Bryana didn't notice us being gone at all.

UPDATE: Allison seems to have responded to antibiotics (I should have mentioned that in the original text), so the assumption is that an infection was causing the issues. Really, it's kind of a mystery still. Could be asthma... could have been a viral infection that went away on its own... who knows. Still, she's acting fine now and hopefully we're done with that little scare.

Zoo concert

Three years ago, when we got our first Zoo membership, we picked up a copy of the concert series schedule, thinking that it would be fun to go to a couple. Sure, we hadn't heard of most of the artists, but that didn't really matter to us, we just wanted to hear live music.

It never happened.

Each subsequent year, when we renewed our membership, we told ourselves: "This summer it will be different. This time we'll make the time and do it!"

So, here we are... At our first Zoo concert. Finally!

Creative uses of cat toys

Allison is nothing if not creative. She will make use of her environment for her self-amusement (sometimes to our frustration).
This time, the object in question was a cat toy that Dawn bought a few weeks ago. Allison decided that it would make a good see-saw.

She is, of course, chowing down on her main staple: Cheetos.

First post!

I've never gotten a "first post" before...

Anyway, this is an experiment.  I've often had the thought that blogging might be interesting.  I frequently have some family story that I want to share with friends, or a programming tip or snippet of code I want to share.

When my wife got pregnant with our second child, I thought that maybe I'd start one then to document the beginning of her life.  Allison is now around 20 months old, so that obviously didn't happen.

Now, strangely, getting an iPhone seems to have been the catalyst that got me actually started.  I'm thinking I'll be able to write some stuff as I sit at my daughters' classes, or in the middle of the night when I'm rocking them back to sleep.  Who knows?

Only time will tell...