This is now the second time in less than a month that I wrote a “Cate is sick, but it’s not so bad” post, only to have things immediately spiral into “holy mother of crap, we are in Baby Sickness Hell.” Cate’s cold got a lot worse yesterday, and the three of us were awake most of the night because she was so miserable. Her nose was so congested that she couldn’t even drink a bottle – she had to keep stopping to take big gulping breaths through her mouth since she wasn’t able to breathe through her nose. Poor baby. We tried everything we could think of to help (Baby Motrin, humidifier, elevated her head), and nothing seemed to comfort her.

Our pediatrician’s office has one branch location that’s open on Saturdays for urgent care, so we headed over there and found out that she has yet another ear infection. This one appears to be pretty bad. The word “pus” was mentioned. I may have nearly thrown up a little.

Hello, amoxicillin, my old friend. We meet again.

The stuff coming out of her nose is just… wow. Dave has helped me hold her down a couple of times so we could use the baby snot-sucker on her, and I am just awed and amazed that someone with such a teeny-tiny nose could possibly have that much gunk stored up there. It’s insane.

(And yes, it really does take both of us to hold her down to accomplish that one little task. Dave holds her head still, I hold both of her hands with one of my arms, and I use the aspirator with the other hand. And hoo boy, does it ever make her mad.)

So that’s our weekend. I bought one of those VapoRub plug-in thingies for us to try in her room tonight. No idea if it’ll help or not, but I’m desperate. Cross your fingers for us. Mama and Dada really need a good night’s sleep.

Cate seems to have developed yet another cold. I think this is just standard “welcome to daycare” stuff – I noticed another little girl there seems to have the same thing. It seems really minor, even though it’s been going on for over a week now. She has a runny nose, and she coughs a lot at night. I set up a humidifier in her room, and that seems to be helping. It’s weird because she doesn’t really seem bothered by it – she’s still active and happy during the day, and it hasn’t affected her appetite at all.

See? Totally happy, in spite of the endless booger supply.

Oh, but if anyone knows a trick for wiping a baby’s nose that won’t make her scream like I’m trying to pull her nose off of her face, please let me know.

I’m trying to gather my thoughts for NaBloPoMo, and figure out what the heck I’m going to blog about for the next 30 days. I have some ideas for things that I’ve been meaning to write about: work, daycare, home improvement projects, etc. My “drafts” folder is full of potential blog posts that are made up of one sentence or a couple of phrases, with the intention to go back and turn them into something real later. I’m kind of curious to see if I can pull off 30 posts in a month, since I’ve never done it before. Or I might end up with a lot of entries that consist entirely of baby photos, who knows.