Friday, February 18, 2011

Down for the count

It's been an interesting week. I've had the flu, or something very similar, for six days now. Theoretically, it should be gone in the next two or three days. Luckily, it hasn't been anything particularly terrible, and I've been fairly well able to keep up with the daily routine without getting tired until the end of the day.

About four days ago, Daughter developed a mild fever. Nothing I really worried about. I anticipated that if I left it alone, it would run its course and she'd be back to normal in a couple days. Every day, it was a little higher. But she kept eating pretty well and wasn't refusing to drink. Still sleeping, still playing, still tormenting Brother.

4:30 in the morning yesterday, though, everything changed. She was crying in her bed. We went to get her and she was roasting. We gave her some Ibuprofen and decided we'd get her in to the doctor as soon as they had an opening. Husband stayed home to accompany us to the doctor. Diagnosis? Influenza type-A. We picked up some Pedialyte on the way home and Husband went to work.

Once home, Daughter really acted like she had the flu. She wouldn't eat, wouldn't drink much, wouldn't sleep, didn't want to be touched. Nothing. Husband came back home from work early because Daughter was finally sleeping, and I didn't want to get her out of bed to go pick up Son from school.

Last night was more of the same. We took turns playing Hold The Baby. Eventually, she tired out enough to go to bed. At the time Husband and I were going to bed, I jokingly thought to myself "See you at 4:30!" but I refrained from saying it on the principle of wanting to avoid it coming true.


1:30 rolls around, and I wake up with terrible internal rumblings combined with alarmingly regular contractions. I would have gladly opted for death at that point. Nothing came of any of it, thankfully, and I went back to sleep. 4:30, cue crying Daughter. Husband went to get her. Fever spiked again. Ibuprofen, and the ensuing fight to get her to please at least lay down so we can go back to sleep. Not happening.

About the time I was accepting that we wouldn't be going back to sleep, Husband's alarm clock made the final decision. After he took a shower, we came downstairs to see if Daughter would eat anything. To my delight, she ate a granola bar and a couple graham crackers.

As a consolation prize, I went and bought myself a set of interchangeable circular needles from knitpicks that I've been coveting for a few weeks. Before ordering them, I debated a long time about whether I wanted the needles more than I wanted a Little Swift knitting tote bag.

The needles won, of course, and next will be the bag. If I even still like knitting at that point.

For a few weeks, I've worked on making individual knit squares to put together for a baby blanket for New Baby. I have seven squares left to make, and now it's occurring to me that I don't know what I'm going to do for the edges. I decided I'm going to make some crocheted flowers to sew to the front of the baby blanket. The flowers are from Nicky Epstein's Crocheted Flowers, and they're the only flowers I like in the whole book. I checked it out at the library after I saw the flowers my sister made. It immediately went onto the list of Books I Wouldn't Spend Money On.


Speaking of books, I have found a few that I really like, thanks to finding them at the library, and I'm working my way toward building up a decent knitting library. One of my most coveted at the moment is Knitted Wild Animals: 15 Adorable, Easy - To - Knit Toys. Now, I've only been knitting a few weeks, but most of these patterns look really easy and the animals are completely cute.

I bought a few books on sale a few weeks ago. Knit. Sock. Love. by Cookie A has some wonderful designs in it. I haven't started to make anything from it yet because a) I don't have small enough DPN's and b) I'm not yet brave enough to try cable work.

I also bought Diagonal Knitting by Katharine Cobey, admittedly only because of the item on the cover. The book is intimidating because the charts are different than any I've come across yet, and because I don't know how to do diagonals. But my grandmother really likes the book on the whole, and she used to do lots of knitting, so I guess it's a win.


A book I bought and did not like one bit was Vampire Knits. The reason I didn't like it was because it's overly Twilight - crazed and I'm not into Twilight. At all. It had one or two really cute designs in it, but they weren't anything I couldn't all ready do on my own, and everything else was pretty much run - of - the - mill stuff that you can find anywhere. I mailed said book out to someone via paperbackswap.

Now that I've completely derailed my own train of thought, I'm going to go check Daughter's temperature and hopefully get her dressed for the day. If I'm lucky, this flu mess will miraculously disappear by midnight and the whole weekend won't be ruined by everyone being sick.

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