Cate finally seems to be recovering from the worst of this latest cold, but she’s still not back to her normal self. I ended up using baby tylenol suppositories to help with her fever because I couldn’t get her to keep anything down. Her fever finally broke yesterday, so she’s gradually been getting better. Her appetite is still off, but at least she isn’t vomiting everything back up.

I, however, am not so good. My cold seems to have turned into full-on bronchitis. I keep waking myself up at night with coughing fits that feel sort of like spasms in my chest, so that’s pretty miserable. Luckily I have a full course of antibiotics that my doctor gave me when I got sick last month, so I’ve started on those to try to kill this thing off before we leave for Mississippi. I try not to take antibiotics unless I have to (hence the reason I never took the ones I was prescribed last month), but past experience has taught me that when I get bronchitis, it’s always bacterial, not viral. So, time to bring on the drugs.

And I must confess, the absolute worst time to have a cold yourself is when your baby is sick. She wants to have her face buried in my neck all the time, and she wails when I set her down, so trying to figure out a way to free my hands so that I can blow my nose is almost impossible. And no one else can soothe her, she just wants her mama all the time.

Last night I put her in her crib when she was already asleep, but she immediately woke up and started to fuss. For the first time ever, I let her cry herself to sleep in her crib because I just needed a few minutes of her not being on me. I still feel guilty about that, but it took maybe four minutes at the most for her to settle herself back to sleep. And she wasn’t wailing, it was more like pitiful whimpering. So I’m pretty sure I haven’t inflicted any long-lasting damage on her. Still, it sucks.

Thinking of deep psychological trauma, though, I think we might’ve accomplished that when we took her to get her picture taken with Santa last week:

It probably wasn’t worth the money to get that one picture, but you know, it’s her first Christmas, so it seemed like one of those big milestone moments that should be documented. And he was a good Santa, real beard and everything.

Update on my mom: she’s doing really well. She’s home, and sounded totally normal when I talked to her. She’s started cutting her painkillers in half so they won’t make her feel stoned, so if she’s able to do that, it doesn’t seem like she’s in that much pain. So that’s good news there. Can’t wait to get there and give her a hug (a week from tomorrow!).