7 Quick Takes - Hives!!

1.  I've not been posting lots of stuff this past month, but I have been writing blog entries (and not posting).  I finally finished my conversion story, it took 7 entries and almost a year and a half of blogging to get it done.  At the prompting of the Holy Spirit, I finished the last three posts this month.  In honor of Thanksgiving being next week, and my gratefulness to God for where my spiritual journey has led me, I'm going to be posting them all next week.  Monday will be Part 5, Tuesday will be Part 6 and the final Part 7 will go up on Wednesday.  This coming Easter will mark my three year anniversary as a Roman Catholic.  It has been an incredible journey so far!  If you could say a quick prayer for my husband and I too, that would be great.  Living a Protestant/Catholic marriage is a cross we never would have chosen on our own, but I believe Jesus is using us in many ecumenical ways to bring some light and healing to the division in the separated Church.

2.  My 8 year old gave me a scare back in October.  Unknown to me, he had went with his older brother out in our backyard to check out the resident frogs AND came back in with multiple mosquito bites!  For normal kids, this isn't such a big deal, but he has a tendency to break out in hives when he gets too many bites.  I didn't notice until he was itching his neck the next morning.  Against my better judgement, instead of giving him oral Benadryl right away I gave him a topical instead.  He hates the taste of the Benadryl and it's always a battle to get him to gag it down (I have three kids who have inherited a terrible gag reflex from me, fun)!  Three hours later he came down with a serious hive attack that scared the life out of me.  His left arm swelled and turned bright red and so did the front of his throat!  After threatening him with serious bodily harm if he did not get the meds down in 2.5 seconds I threw him in a cold shower and kept him talking to me.  I debated whether to call an ambulance the whole time, but he wasn't having breathing issues.  Experience with him and hives told me the attack would subside as quickly as it flared up (which it did).

Like I said, he's had hives before but never this bad.  I was thinking all sorts of expletives in my head as to why I didn't insist on an epi pen the last time he had a hive breakout (not that I would have used it this time, but it would have been nice to have the backup).  I spoke to the doctor about it then but he didn't think that attack was serious enough to warrant it.  You better believe I made another appointment for that Thursday afternoon and absolutely insisted on it for this go round!  I didn't have to argue with him at all this time, but maybe it was the crazed mom look in my eye.  I also came away with an appointment to an allergist to try and discover what, exactly, is causing the reaction.

Game Boy did awesome for the testing
He earned a lunch date with Mom to McD's!

We did the full testing, and thankfully he's actually not allergic to anything.  The allergist diagnosed him with a very high histamine count, which overreacts when he gets too many mosquito bites.  The doctor said he would probably grow out of it, but in the meantime suggested OTC Zyrtec.

3.  So I put the epi pens up on a high, high shelf in the kitchen.  When I say "high", I mean the shelf actually sits higher than the top of the fridge.  They were still in the original, plain looking green box and stuck alongside other plain looking stuff...so no cause for worry, right?  I came downstairs a few days later to find actual epi pens (thankfully still inside their protective cases) sitting on my kitchen table.  Seriously!  I immediately suspected the 5 and 8 year old but it turns out the culprit was 2 year old Toddler Boy!  Unbelievable that he would scale the counter and three shelves to reach it.  What happened to my sweet little boy?  He has turned into a climbing daredevil extraordinaire.  We've had to change car seats in the van too because he can unbuckle the other one.  He also figured out how to open the baby gate about 6 months ago.  It's like raising Houdini!

4.  Since Toddler Boy is on a roll here, I discovered this in the Living Room...

In case you can't figure it out, that is the counting bears from our math curriculum taking a peanut butter "bath".

I had to remove him from this
when I realized it was turned on
and he tried to drive thru some
empty boxes!

5.  The kids and I about got ran over coming out of Wal-Mart this week by a woman talking on her cell phone.  This right after my second son accidentally rammed his cart into the back of my leg and took the skin off my ankle (in his defense, I had to stop suddenly because a man in a wheelchair steered in front of me).  We were pushing two carts with the younger ones sitting in both of them and two weeks worth of groceries and me limping along on my ankle.  We were right in front of the store and still in the crosswalk and almost across when she came barreling down the road.  I thought she saw us (we were pretty hard to miss), but obviously the phone call was more important than the pedestrians.  I lunged forward and grabbed my son's cart and yanked it back out of her path before she looked up, saw us, slammed on her brakes and swerved.  Then of course she had the nerve to throw her hands up (because, yes, of course it's my fault you can't put your phone down and keep your eyes on the road).  I was steaming, my adrenaline was still pumping as I loaded the groceries and sat down in the van.  Doug and Firstborn were still in the store so I had time to calm down a bit before driving home.  I caught myself wondering how the headline on the news would have looked "mom and four children mowed down by driver in Wal-Mart parking lot".  The craziness of the holiday shopping season isn't even here yet and already other shoppers are starting to get to me.

6.  Speaking of shopping, the kids were starting to go stir crazy last week and the weather was a bit yucky so we headed over to Rural King.  There's lots of neat stuff to look at and the older boys wanted to get some new fishing lures.  I like it because the free popcorn keeps the little ones entertained in the cart.  I realized from looking through the clothes section that the camo phase has really started taking off in our area.  Camouflage used to just be for hunters and military, but now women are getting in on the act.  I've noticed a few young women in our area wearing it.  I guess we have Duck Dynasty to thank for that (which is a popular show at our house, with four young men in residence).  There's lots of pink camouflage clothes, they even carry camo liengere!  I'm trying to picture a man hunting in said attire.  The deer would be laughing, I'm sure.

Popcorn, anyone?

7.  Our homeschool has been super busy because this week marked the first week we're trying out the Tapestry of Grace curriculum.  For a first week, it's gone pretty well.  There are a few things I planned that didn't get done (like, say, an art project), but otherwise I'm pleased.  The curriculum takes more planning time than I'm accustomed to because it's new.  Also, this means I need to be able to head to the library to check out books.  Which wouldn't be an issue if I didn't have 1. overdue books to return and 2. two books that need to be replaced because Toddler Boy destroyed them.  "Destroyed" might be too strong of a term, they actually are quite readable, but I know from experience that our library will not accept a book if it has the smallest thing wrong with it.  A tear on a page or any small mark on the cover and that book ends up in our collection at home.  Occasionally, one of my kids will run up with an old library book and say "Mom, we forgot to take this one back"!  I look at it and tell them that, no, it's ours.  One of our family's contribution to society is to keep our library stocked with brand new books.  Doug asked why we didn't have some sort of system, like putting all the library books in one spot on our bookshelf, to keep them out of harms way.  I stared blankly at him and then referenced the epi pen incident (see take #3).  Where, exactly, in our house would a book be considered "safe"?  I ordered the replacement books from Amazon and I'll be heading in to return the other ones today.  I'm wondering if I should just chalk this year up as hopeless and turn in my library card now before I wrack up any more fees and my librarian uncle disowns me.  We paid a lot of money for our card (where we live is considered "county" and not inside the city limits), so I refuse to give in.  Maybe I should buy a gun safe from Rural King and make it into a "book safe"?

Looking forward to next week because Doug's on vacation all week, which makes me happy, happy, happy!!  Go check in with Jen to read more Quick Takes at Conversion Diary!