Does It Ever End?

I feel like I am drowning in sickies lately.

I'll begin with sicky children...well, Maryn!
After her bout with RSV, we thoguht she was on the mend after a week of breathing treatments and oral steroids. She continued to be extra fussy, and then started complaining of her ear hurting. After a few nights of her waking up just two or three hours after putting her to bed and sleeping withus all night I decided it was time for Greg to do something. He checked out her ears and of course she hd an ear infection. Of course she had an ear infection why else would she say her ear "hut" and cry nonstop for several days. Well she practically does scream nonstop EVERYDAT but that's a whole other post. We got her some antibiotics and started treating her. For sure we were definitely on the feel better side of this mountain we had been climbing...

UNTIL her exzema seemed to be out of control on Friday.

A very happy Maryn, only because I was taking her picture!

She has had terrible exzema since she was born, practically. She has been treated with many different steroid crams, oral steroids, lotions, creams, soaps... Some days it is so bad on her feet that they bleed. It had gotten so bad on her feet that she refused to wear shoes other than flip flops until just about a month ago when the weather has been too chilly to allow her to continue wearing flip flops. On Friday the exzema made its way onto her face where it had never been before. I remember our pediatrician saying once before if gets on her face it may be a food allergy. I hope it wasn't and asked Greg to ask around at the hospital to get others' opinions. He happened to see and allergist, as a patient, and he asked him what he thought. He said usually when it makes it way to the face it is either from mountain cedar or a food allergy. Mountain cedar didn't seem to be at a very high level since the ice storm, but I hoped it was. The top three food allergy that is apparent with exzema are soy, corn, and peanuts. I don't feed her tofu so I figured the soy was not the culprit. Corn and peanuts were definitely red flags to me. Her TOTAL diet(please no judging on my being a good or bad Mom), consists of ramen noodles, hotdogs(on occassion I think she is getting burned out), chips(especially ones made form corn like doritos and funyuns), Chick fil A(she would eat this for every meal if I allowed) and they fry their stuff in PEANUT oil!! I hoped it would clear up. It has and I'm not sure what made it get better. I have been greasing her up at night, she ahsn't eaten ChickfilA since Friday, and her chip intake is down a huge amount. So hopefully it isn't a food allergy to something she SURVIVES on and something I give her so I can SURVIVE! I guess I will contiue to monitor this and it will happily work out for all of us.



Sicky Dishwasher


I woke up the other morning to my dishwasher button lights illuminated. I just assumed my sweet husband had turned it on before coming to bed the night before. I began unloading the "clean" dishes, and half way throught they became more"unclean" than "clean". Maybe Greg hadn't ran the dishwasher that night. I then began unloading my kitchen cupboards and refilling the dishwasher. I turned it on again and walked away. After my mornign errand I returned home to the same light on the dishwasher, which I asumed was the clean light. I looked more closely this time and relaized it was a light I had never seen on before. I couldn't figure out the problem and waited until Greg came home to check things out for me. He became frustrated when Mr. Handyman had no idea what the issue was. I then became frustrated as I unloaded it again and then began handwahsing everything. Not usually a big deal but this day it was a bigger deal.

The next morning he called Sears to see if they had any suggestions on it and said it sounded like the control panel was screwed up. To get soemone out to look at it was 65 bucks just to get tem here and then for them to replace the control panel it would be soemwhere in the ball park of $170. So they were telling us our 2 1/2 year old dishwasher was onthe frits and would cost around 250 smackers to get it working again. WHAT??? We only paid 250 dollars for it brand new. Yes, it was on clearacne because it was the previous year's model but it was NEW for the same price they were saying I needed to pay to fix it.

Well, I was all about handwashing dishes since we would only be living in this house for about seven more months but then I thought, "to sell the house, we get an inspection, it wouldn't pass inspection if evry thing wasn't working". We had to get a new one either now(for me to enjoy) or wait, suffer through 7 months of handwashing every bowl, spoon, cup, pan we use and then buy the next owner a brand spankin' new one to enjoy. I'm not crazy. I decided I wanted to enjoy it before someone else gets to enjoy it. Greg went out looking and found a new one with a "little" imperfection(what I like to call two dents in the front panel) for 200 dollars. I admit I wasn't too keen on the idea of something that wasn't perfect at first, but after much persuading Greg convinced me if the next owner couldn't handle a dent or two in the dishwahser then they would probably not want our house that probably has bigger problems than that.

So now we are the proud new owners of a dishwasher we will be using for half a year.



I'm hoping and praying things will stay healthy around here for awhile because I don't know if my patience, sanity, and my own health can handle anything else.