What a week....

Have to keep this short....

But. First of all, thank you thank you thank you from the bottom of my heart for the recent tremendous response of offers of donating milk to my little Miss Kaitlyn! I'm overwhelmed with gratitude (and have received so many offers that I haven't been able to respond to everyone yet, and with the week I've had you may understand why I'm so behind).

We are doing well on milk donations for the time being, but I will get back to your emails, I promise (I've responded to about 10 so far, but haveI have about 25 more that I need to respond to!). As I said, I’m completely overwhelmed with gratitude by all the generous moms who have offered (some even before their babes were born!). WOW. It makes me speechless that that the world is a good place. Being a mom finally, I only now understand how special the bond is betwen moms.

And on the subject of breast milk donators, here is a great place if you have extra milk that you'd like to donate if I won't be able to get your milk: MilkShare This is a site for mom's to get in touch with one-another to either donate or request breast milk. How wonderful!! Someone posted this site on my blog comments and I wanted to share it with everyone.

Here’s my week:

Brian's been gone since Monday.

Kaitlyn came down with a bad cold on Saturday, which she promptly gave to me on Wednesday. Her cold and mucus makes her vomiting even worse than it normally is, so I've been up a lot at night. And, she now has a terrible cough too, so I've been giving her breathing treatments every 4 hours or so to try to keep it out of her lungs.

The cough sounded so bad that today I took her to the pediatrician's office and the good news is that its' not in her lungs, and her ears are clear too. phew that's a relief. I thought it sounded so bad the scare of RSV started hitting me.

Monday night I had a g-tube support group meeting in the city that I really wanted to attend, but had forgotten that Brian went out of town. Before he left he had adjusted Kaitlyn's car seat (she's in a big seat now, but the straps were set in the wrong place) so I had to figure out how to remove, adjust the straps, all while trying to hurry to drive to the city, in which I was incredibly late.

Lets see what else...

Hmm, I found out on Tuesday that I needed to have and then had my first ever root canal yesterday...fun fun fun! Wow, I really am 40.

And if you remember my saying that my nurse from last year officially retired, I've been training a new nurse this week that started out a bit rocky (and I'm very gun shy about help after a horrible nanny scam experience that I haven't had time to go into detail about).

I think the new nurse will be ok, but I’m telling you, wow, I've never had to explain the same thing over and over and over until I thought I was literally going to go bonkers, and I'm supposed to trust her with my daughter....? Her task that she was having some major difficulties with was defrosting breast milk and combining with Compleat (the formula we are currently trying). It’s not rocket science. I had it all mapped out, total volumes for each feed throughout the day, and after 4 days of explaining it to her multiple times, she still wasn’t getting it!

I showed a house last night to clients who liked it so I wrote up an offer for them to purchase it - I'll be presenting the offer on Sunday.

We are having a horrible cold snap (it's in the high 30’s now at midnight and is expected to hit the 20's the next 2 nights) and so the following story is worth a good chuckle now that it’s over:

Yesterday morning (after trying to clean up many morning vomits in bed with Kaitlyn (who wanted nothing to do with cuddling with mom in bed while mom tried to catch up on a few winks)...I heard this really strange noise, like a car warming up outside, but it went on for a while. Finally, with Kaitlyn in arms, I got up to get my day going (to defrost breast milk and other morning duties before taking Kaitlyn to one of her medical appointments) but found Kaitlyn’s Mylar balloon being sucked onto the heater air-intake on our ceiling. It was entirely covering it so no air was making it to the heater. That’s what was making the noise (and why it was so cold in the house). I grabbed a long broom (with Kaitlyn still in arms) and swiped at the balloon. Instead of achieving the intended results, the grill covering the heater intake fell to the floor with a loud bang and the balloon was swooshed into the air intake as fast as you can believe. FAST. Holy shit! I sat Kaitlyn on the ground, ran to turn off the heater (I wasn’t sure if Helium was flammable or not), got a flashlight, shined it up the shaft but the balloon had disappeared from view. (And of course Brian is out of town).

After a lot of calls to Brian I finally figured out how to get to the filter in the heater (no easy task, he coudn't even remeber how to do it) and unbelievably the balloon had made it’s way all to the filter, so I got it out. Phew, I didn’t know what I was going to do without any heat until Brian came home tomorrow. Hmm, well that’s about it for my week.

Kaitlyn weighed in at 18.5 pounds at the pediatrician today by the way!