Ambulance ride of 2018

YOU GUYS.

I’m so so far behind. 

Life just really took it up a notch this past week.   Or am I two weeks behind now?  There’s no real way to catch up.  Personal responsibilities aside, we have had some extra craziness lately. 

But we are all good now and life is cruising along with only a week left until Christmas!

So how to recap a dozen-ish jam packed days?  No way man.  Here are some highlights. 

LOOOOOVED my first imperfect produce box.  I will tell you more about it later.  It’s not sponsored or anything, but it’s super cool and I think it’s an important company to highlight.  They’re doing good work.  

Last week Valley’s preschool performed at all the Sunday services and P played the chimes with his choir in the lobby.   

Fast forward to this past weekend when they flip-flopped rolls and we got to watch him perform on the main stage.  It was 100% cuteness overload. 

In between all of that, Kyle went out of town and I made this delicious din.  The kids loved the fact that the salad had chips on it. Who doesn’t love a tortilla chip filled salad?!  So much better than croutons.  I’ll share the recipe later because that night things went in a direction I did not anticipate.

And we ended up in the ER.  Lame.  

I’ll back up a bit to very briefly recap how that all went down.  

Soccer got canceled and the kids were bummed so we spent the afternoon riding our bikes allll over our neighborhood.  It was the longest ride we have done to this date because they wanted to see every different house’s decorations and then after we had exhausted all those routes, they decided they wanted to ride to P’s school “to practice” the commute.  We have been thinking it’s about time for him to ride to school now that he has solidly mastered the two wheeler, but for some reason or another, we just haven’t taken the initiative.  First off, he is supposed to stay calm after his morning milk dose (although I’m fairly certain that ignoring the rest period for dairy would be fine at this point).  Second, it’s been quite cold recently (in the 30s) and I want him to love biking so I don’t know if this is the ideal weather to start out with…all that is to say…they felt like doing a dry run of the commute and I figured why not?  It’s a little over a mile (one way) but they seemed set on it, so off we went!  And they did amazing!  V held us back a bit, but P would stop when he got too far ahead, and we ended up making it there and back no prob.  And since it was still before sunset, they then played soccer in the backyard while I did some raking and pruning and picked tangerines (for dinner later that night). 

It was a perfectly awesome (super active) afternoon.  After which we had dinner and baths and went to bed. 

I had a little chocolate and then went to give kisses before tucking myself into bed…at which point I heard weird noises from my big boy’s room.

I figured he was having a nightmare or something and went to check on him in the off chance he didn’t sort himself out on his own.  From there it was a bit of a blur.  I was having a hard time arousing him and he wasn’t really responding to me but he was making these bizarre gagging motions and wincing and crying as if in pain.  V had thrown up the day before so I thought perhaps he got what she had and whisked him into the bathroom (partially to get him on a tile floor because cleaning vomit off the carpet two days in a row is like fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice…ya know…but also because I wanted to assess him in better lighting and see what was going on).  He was still really hard to communicate with and wasn’t answering any of my questions, but was in a great deal of distress so I put my ear on the back of him and listened for breath sounds.  I’m used to wheezing when he’s having a reaction, which is the start of his symptoms, but this time I didn’t hear anything.  Like, no air was being exchanged.  I opened his mouth and looked in and asked him if he was having a reaction and if he could breathe or not and if I needed to give him epi.  He wasn’t able to answer so I just listened to my gut, grabbed an epi pen and went for it.  I was talking to him the whole time, telling him my plan, asking his permission, and generally including him in the process despite his lack of ability to reply.  Probably because Kyle was gone and I was just needing another opinion, but nonetheless, as soon as I pushed that needle into his thigh he cried out.  He later told me that’s the first thing he really remembers.  Then I called 911 and while I waited for them to arrive I held him and listened to him breath and frantically texted Kyle about what was going down.  He got better over the next few minutes and was able to talk and so I could relax a bit knowing that by the time the paramedics arrived he would at least be alive. 

After they came, he needed a bunch more oxygen support and meds so we had to go to the hospital to figure out what was going on.  I was shocked about how fast it came on and confused that it could be allergy related since he hadn’t had peanuts since noon and has never had that kind of reaction since oit.  But before all that I had to wake up Valley and explain the situation to her because she needed to come with us.  

Another year, another hospital ride with my kids.  Ugh.  Can we NOT make this an annual tradition???  Maybe in 2019…

Once in the ED, P was doing much better thanks to the breathing treatments, but a chest x-ray revealed that he had croup and pneumonia.  SO WEIRD.  How does a kid go from biking and playing soccer all afternoon without a single cough to not breathing in a few hours???  I am mystified by it all, but so thankful that I didn’t go to bed a moment sooner.  

My dad was the hero of the century that night because we were discharged well after midnight and he drove to Davis to get our stranded selves back to our house.  I was on the other side of town with only one carseat and no car!?!  P slept in my bed for the next couple of nights until Kyle was back and by then he was 100% again.  Phew!

And since then we have had more bouts of diarrhea and vomiting!!  Tis the season I guess.  Ugh.  We had a super long healthy stretch from the start of school until now, so I guess we were due, but I need both kids to get healthy asap because my sister is having her baby RIGHT NOW and I need to go visit!  

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They keep me on my toes, that’s for sure, but man are they my everything.