All posts by tracy

Too Much Crap for 140 Characters

I’m a Twitterholic, but I can’t fit all the crap that’s happened in the last 3 days in just 140 characters.

First and foremost, we had the vomiting baby. It actually started Saturday night, after of all things, a meal of baby food peas. The spectacular green vomit landed all over the baby and the living room rug. But otherwise, she looked fine. We just chalked it up to new food and sitting up right after eating and didn’t think much more about it.

Even on Sunday, the baby acted fine. She took a long nap in the morning, but she’s done that at daycare before so I wasn’t particularly surprised. In the afternoon, it was Sammy’s turn for a nap, and as Mark had been sick all weekend, Sasha and I were left to entertain each other. We danced a little bit, we knocked over blocks a little bit, and generally had a good time.

But in the late afternoon, she threw up again. Now we began to get a little more worried. I cleaned her up and tried to put her to bed, giving her some Tylenol for a mild fever, but she threw up yet again. I eventually got her into bed, but obviously she was going to stay home on Monday. It was a bit of a fitful night, with her waking up at 1:00 AM, 4:00 AM, and for good at 6:30 AM.

After dropping Mark and Sammy off at the Metro, I managed to get her to nap for about an hour. I manage to get through my morning phone meetings, but the last one came just as she was waking up, and she cried throughout the meeting, as all my coworkers heard when I took my iPhone off mute.

Right after that last meeting, I noticed that she was quite warm. I took her temperature and it was a whopping 103.2. Time for some more Tylenol and a call to the doctor’s office. Seriously, while I was navigating the doctor’s voice mail, she through up again. By this point, I had learned to recognize the distinctive little coughing sound and look in her eyes that always preceded another attack of vomiting. So I swiftly carried her into the kitchen where she was free to vomit all over the vinyl floor — which she did. Yuck.

Still on the phone with the doctor, I took her in later that afternoon. This was the worst part. While she felt like she was burning up, her temperature only registered around 100. They pricked her finger to take a blood count and discovered her white cell count was very high (24,000, I learned today). So that prompted more tests: a urine sample for which they used a catheter and a more involved blood draw which took two attempts to get. And after all of that, two simultaneous injections of antibiotics in either leg. My poor baby was being treated like a pin cushion!

She managed to keep down the Tylenol she received at the doctor’s office, but an attempt later that night wasn’t as successful — more vomit. We tried to put her down at bed time, but she ended up puking instead, and again later that evening, throwing up not only the medication but also any Pedialyte and nursing that I had managed to get into her.

Since the only thing that seemed to make her happy was Mommy holding her, that’s pretty much what I did for the rest of the night. Whenever I could squeeze a few drops of Pedialyte into her, and I nursed her as little as possible so that she wouldn’t have too much in her stomach.

Not the most comfortable of nights with her sleeping on my lap and me sleeping sitting upright on the couch, my feet propped up on Sammy’s little chair. Again, she woke up every few hours, but nor more vomiting.

Today, she’s been a lot better. No more fever, and (so far) no more vomiting. Again with a nice nap in her crib in the morning, which allowed me to take a little nap in my own bed. But then, there was my iPhone…

You see, my 3 year old son loves to play with Mommy and Daddy’s iPhones. I let him play with mine for a few minutes this morning while we were getting ready to leave and he had already eaten his breakfast. At one point, and I must’ve missed all this, it fell to the ground. Whether he dropped it or whether it fell from wherever he put it, is still a matter of debate. But this appeared to be the straw after my dropping it a couple of times a few weeks ago. Now the power button in the top right corner won’t press down, or more precisely, won’t come up. It’s permanently down. I can’t power it off, and when it goes off on it’s own, it won’t come back. It just does this continuous reset loop and won’t come to the home screen unless you plug it into the computer.

So I made an appointment to go into the Apple store that’s near Sasha’s doctor. I didn’t really want to drag her to the mall, but she had another appointment today anyway and she looked like she was feeling better. Most importantly, she hadn’t thrown up at all today and wasn’t running a fever. So after her morning nap, it was off to Montgomery Mall.

The genius tried resetting it, but that didn’t fix the problem, since it was a hardware problem, not a software one. Alternatives: replace with another Edge phone for $199, or spend that same amount for a new 3G. Well, reluctantly I opt for buying a 3G, except I would’ve opted for the 16 GB model which would’ve run $299. (There was also a now-moot option of working a deal with Best Buy Mobile, but that didn’t pan out so I won’t bore you with those details.) Time was now running short to get to Sasha’s doctor’s appointment, so I start the process online in the Apple store. But instead of $199/$299 for the 3G phone, AT&T wants to charge me the full, unsubsidized price (what is it, $499/$599?)! WTF?!?

The genius suggests I go to the AT&T store and try to work out a deal there. So I go. But no deal. The guy won’t give me the subsidized price (apparently since we used our 1 Edge phone upgrade option when Mark upgraded his phone). He keeps offering alternatives, each one more ludicrous than the last. I finally leave, almost in tears, to wolf down a quick McDonald’s lunch and get Sasha to her appointment.

The appointment goes much better today than yesterday. Only one pin prick to measure a closer-to-normal white blood cell count. The urine culture ruled out a UTI, and the blood work is still pending. Sasha cried nearly the whole time, more from the memory of yesterday, I think, than of discomfort.

After a quick side trip to pick up some prescribed antibiotics (which I think are totally unnecessary, BTW), we’re home, where she’s laughing and rolling, and knocking down more blocks.

But I’m still iPhone-less.

Baby Sasha, feeling better this afternoon.
Baby Sasha, feeling better this afternoon.

What Happens in Vegas… Comes to BWI?

So, fellow Marylanders.  Still don’t believe in the slippery slope?  Try this one then:

Del. Eric M. Bromwell (D-Baltimore County) has introduced legislation that would allow 3,000 slot machines inside the secure gate areas at Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall airport. I suppose the idea is the same as the recently voter-approved legislation that is allowing slot machines to be installed in five locations around the state: tax people who can’t do math and can likely least afford it. But this one has a wrinkle: by placing slots in the airport, you’re targeting travelers who presumably have money to burn (and frankly, who doesn’t these days?) and are likely from out of state or even out of the country.

Let’s hope that on the off chance this passes, they’ll have better success in implementing it. So far with the previous slots approval, two of the six bidders for the five slot licenses have failed to provide the $22.5 million in fees, and the total number of slots requested has only totalled 6,550, far fewer than the 15,000 allowed under the law.

Slot machines were a bad idea last November, and they’re a bad idea now.

Hey, I’ll admit it. I like going to Las Vegas to gamble and have done so on occassion. But when I board my plane at McCarran, that’s the last I expect to see a slot machine until I go back next time.

She won’t eat it. She hates everything.

Add carrots to the list of fruits and vegetables Sasha doesn’t like. The list now includes such baby mainstays as:

These are carrots. These are NOT Sasha's favorite food.
These are carrots. These are NOT Sasha’s favorite food.
  • bananas
  • applesauce
  • butternut squash

What does she like? Well, she deigns to eat sweet potatoes, if you coax her enough. But her only real favorite is oatmeal baby cereal. That’s right, the tasteless gray gruel that most reasonable humans, baby or otherwise, would tolerate, not enjoy.

Does she appreciate the fact that I make her babyfood from real ingredients, lovingly baking the sweet potatoes and squash and steaming the carrots for her then running them through the food processor to make a nice purée easy for her toothless mouth to handle? No. All she does is make a face as if to say, “What is this slop you’re trying to force down my throat?”

At the tender age of seven months, my daughter has already proven herself quite the fickle eater.

Update:

Here’s a picture of Sasha eating carrots. Notice the look of disgust on her face. Shortly after this picture was taken, she threw up the carrots and a significant portion of oatmeal. Shortly after that, she went to bed.

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Help Me Choose!

Okay, people of the Internets. I need your help. I’ve been offered by various family members a new notebook computer for my birthday, but I’m torn between two Apple offerings: the 15″ MacBook Pro and the 13″ MacBook. On one hand, I’m drooling over the lighter weight and smaller form factor of the 13″ MacBook and I’ve always thought that the MacBook Pro I have now was a bit overkill for me, at least when I got it (but at the time, it was the only Intel machine Apple offered). On the other hand, the graphics capabilities of the MacBook Pro are much better than its little sibling, and the higher screen real estate (which is what I’m used to now) would be useful when working with iPhoto and iMovie (two applications I’m using more and more).

Now, since this is going to be a gift, cost is not technically a factor, but I’d prefer not to break my benefactors’ banks. So asking for a MacBook would be a kinder request.

So what do you think? Please vote in my poll and help me decide. Thanks!

[poll id=”1″]

New Year’s Resolutions

I don’t normally do this, mostly because I loathe New Years (it’s just another reminder to me that I’m getting older etc. etc.), but I actually have TWO resolutions for this coming year.  Normally, I don’t have any because I believe that any change you want to make in your life shouldn’t have to wait until some arbitrary date on a calendar.  Nevertheless, things have gotten to the point in my life where I feel like I need to take action, now, on two fronts:

#1: Clean Up My House

This is a little more than just scrubbing the bathroom (and honestly, I don’t even do that; I have a housekeeper who does a much better job than I can do). I mean going through every nook, every cranny, and every pile of crap in my house and getting it all under control. Scanning in the kids’ art projects and sending the originals off to the grandmothers. Getting rid of the mementos I haven’t looked out (or taken out of boxes) in 4 years. Get my house into some sort of organized shape so that it doesn’t look like a FEMA zone all the time.

A one off on this theme is to redo the basement into a kids playroom so that we can get most of the toys out of the living room (where we’re always tripping on them) and into a dedicated space that the kids can call their own. This includes laying down new flooring since the cats have ruined the carpet there.

Another related part of this is to redo the floor in the kitchen. The original vinyl tiling that’s there has been peeling up since pretty much we bought the house and if we ever want to sell the place ourselves, that needs to be fixed up.

It’s a big project, bigger than it sounds, and maybe I should call it more “organize my life”, but if I can tackle the clutter that I live in, it will be that much of an improvement in my life.

#2: Don’t Buy Any More Books Until I’ve Read the Ones I Have

I should probably add to that “ask for books as gifts”. I have a pile of books I’d love to read, but I simply don’t have the time. Why compound the problem with more books? In fact, I haven’t read a single book I received as a gift for Christmas 2007! So I really don’t need any more. I don’t need to buy them, and I don’t need to ask for them. I need to read what I’ve got.

And the same goes for audiobooks. I recently bought one that I’ve only listened to the first 3 chapters of. I can’t listen to them in the car because no one else in my family wants to listen to them (and they’re almost always in the car with me, especially during the daily commute). I find it hard to listen at work because I can’t concentrate on the text and what I’m working on at the same time. So again, no time.

Basically, both of these resolutions come down to setting priorities. I’m going to find the time to clean my house and read my books. I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish this and still get any sleep, but I have 365 days to figure that out.