So, this post that I wrote a couple of months ago about how Catie seems to have outgrown her asthma? Let’s just go ahead and redact that whole thing.

Since we took Catie off her daily inhaler several weeks ago, I noticed she was coughing a lot. I figured it was just sinus drainage stuff, she uses a prescription nasal spray for that sometimes. Rather than worry, I made sure Dave had an extra bottle of her nasal spray at his place so we could make sure she got it every night. I figured it was likely related to allergies and would eventually pass.

Dave mentioned last week that her cough seemed worse, and I noticed it when she was at home.

It was Dave’s weekend to have the kids, but Catie got invited to a birthday party, and the kids’ social outings tend to fall more under my umbrella. I picked her up and we went to the birthday party. (We didn’t want Lucy to feel left out, so I took her to my parents’ house while Catie and I went to the party. Getting to have her grandparents all to herself is a special treat, so she was happy with that. I pulled up in the driveway, got Lucy out of her car seat, she ran up to the house, and as soon as she saw my mom, she turned around and said, “Bye, Mommy!” Like, see ya later, dude, I’m good now.)

The birthday party was at a bounce house, and Catie had a great time jumping around with her friends.

By the time the kids were supposed to stop and have cake, Catie was coughing a lot. She didn’t want to sit down with the other kids, she was clinging to me and telling me she didn’t feel good. I got her a bottle of water, and she eventually sat while everyone sang happy birthday and ate cake, then she was back by my side.

The other kids went back to play on the bounce houses again. Catie said, “Mommy, I can’t breathe. I wanna go home.”

That set off some internal alarm in my head, and we said goodbye to the birthday girl, thanked the parents for inviting us, and got out of there. I took her home and set her up with albuterol in the nebulizer, and she was fine after a few minutes of a breathing treatment.

She went back to Dave’s for the rest of the weekend, but we’ve been texting, and her cough is still pretty rough, and she’s needed the inhaler several times. (Dave has asthma too, so he typically recognizes the symptoms faster than I do.) I called the pediatrician’s office this morning to make sure this is all documented in her chart, and to have them call in more refills of her inhaler.

So, it looks like she hasn’t outgrown her asthma after all, and that it really was her daily inhaler that was keeping her asymptomatic all this time. And hey, if that’s all she needs to manage her asthma, that’s fine, we can totally handle that.

It’s not the end of the world by any means. It sucks, but she’ll be fine.

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On a completely unrelated note: I ended up talking with a couple of the other parents from Catie’s class at the birthday party, and it turns out that we weren’t the only ones who had a bad year in first grade and who didn’t care for the teacher. It was reassuring to know that it wasn’t just us, and that other parents and their kids struggled in the exact same way that we did. I mean, it sucks for all of the kids who had a rough school year – and it’s heartbreaking to hear kids say they hate school when they’re only in first grade. But it reinforces my theory that the issue really was more with the teacher than with Catie, since our experience was not unique.

I’ve already emailed Catie’s second grade teacher and told him about some of our struggles this past year, and the challenges that Catie has been dealing with. I figure it’s good to make him an ally from the get-go. His reply was very nice, and I’m feeling optimistic that we might be able to turn this around for her.

Fingers crossed.