The Sickies

Well, it's been a glamorous couple of days in the Russell household, let me tell ya. At one point Mark was getting pooped on and puked on at the same time. Early on in the making of this blog I vowed to never go into the intricacies of our kid's bodily functions so I won't discuss the shade of green it was... nor which of the two I'm referring to right now. Better him than me.

Our poor baby has RSV, a respiratory virus, and has been utterly miserable since Saturday. That's five days of having a fever, coughing, wheezing, being congested, and having a difficult time nursing; because as it turns out, when given the choice to eat or breathe, infants usually choose to breathe. Our poor Sickie hasn't been able to sleep anywhere but on me during the last couple of days (and nights). I'm literally sore from holding her, mostly due to the amount of hours I've logged sitting completely still in the same position on the coach as to not wake her.

It's the worst thing to see your baby sick and miserable and not being able to make her feel better. It's scary, stressful and emotionally draining when you don't know what's wrong or how serious it is. It certainly helps that Mark's an ER physician, and I'm so thankful for his knowledge, but he's been working nights which means he's gone at night (obviously) and getting much-needed sleep during the day. Plus it took getting a chest X-ray to know what was really going on in this case. We took her to the pediatrician yesterday at 9:30 a.m. and apparently it's going around because Ava's was the second case of RSV the doctor had seen already seen that day.

Thankfully, Ava was looking and feeling much better today but we still has a ways to go until we get our sweet, happy, healthy, baby back. I know I've said it before, but as sad and draining as these times of illness can be, I can't help but feel thankful that what we get to deal with is treatable and manageable and will only last a couple more days. I don't know how parents deal with watching their babies and children suffer life-threatening diseases. And hope and pray I never do.

Here's a video of our usually happy girl giving her Mama some courtesy laughs even though she feels like crap. The weird noises are me pretending to eat her fingers. It's kinda our thing.

Notice the chapped red cheeks, it's a rash that's part of the virus. Sad huh.

On a brighter note (for me anyways, not for the poor little girls) I'm watching Toddlers & Tiaras right now and feeling like a pretty damn good mom all of a sudden.