Our first truly major snow is about to hit in the next few hours. We’ve actually gotten a decent amount of snow, and snow from weeks ago is still on the ground, yet I don’t think that this much will have fallen in a single bout in this amount of time. Originally, forecasters were calling for something like 20″ in some parts of Iowa, while we’d probably get closer to 15″ over a period of two days, however that estimate has been reduced. Last night, we could have gotten up to 4″, but I’d be surprised if we even got 1″. The problem last night, however, was drifting snow, leading to a near 4′ drift on our sidewalk (very fluffy though, so pretty easy to remove). As of this posting, they’re forecasting more like 8-10″ for Cedar Rapids, and then 10″-12″ for Iowa City between 3:00 pm today and 9:00 am tomorrow.
Normally, this wouldn’t worry me at all. My job tends to be flexible such that, if I was snowed in under 12″ of snow, I wouldn’t really have to go anywhere. Unfortunately, I’m scheduled to teach to the Pharm.D. students tomorrow, so if the University doesn’t cancel classes, I’m still required to get in and there’s no way for me to notify the 100+ students in the class that I won’t be there. Regardless, I’m thinking of various strategies for solving this problem, but I hope that the University goes ahead and cancels classes ahead of time (i.e. this afternoon!!) so I can sleep well without having to worry about tomorrow morning. Missouri is getting hammered more than Iowa is and, yesterday, SLU and Wash U in St. Louis both preemptively canceled classes for today.
Aside from snow issues, Meg hasn’t been feeling well. Really, she hasn’t been feeling well for the past few weeks, but it really started last weekend when she stopped eating as well as she had been and certainly stopped sleeping as well as she had been. Naptime still happened, and gradually improved as the week drew on, but she still woke up multiple times during the night and would stay awake during that period, crying out any time you’d try to lay her down (and would still cry even after she’d been asleep in your arms…and when I say “asleep,” I mean “out”).
My Mom visited this past weekend and reminded us of the fact that my sister was prone to ear infections around this age, and ear infections that didn’t present with a fever. Ear infections that seemed to flare up more at night, rather than during the day. Suffice to say, Brooke took Meg into the doc yesterday and, indeed, Meg has infections in both ears. She’ll be on antibiotics for 10 days or so and we’ll need to take Meg in again in a few weeks to confirm that the ear infections are cleared up, but hopefully this will set us on a better trend toward sleeping through the night!
Of course, unfortunately, this means that Meg will miss her last few weeks of water babies…
Also, Meg has had a cough for months now. We hadn’t paid much attention to it, thinking it was related to the fact that she goes to daycare and is exposed to any number of evil demon baby diseases. She’d seen the doc a few times during that period and the doc agreed. However, yesterday, the doc was a bit more concerned about it, as the coughing was a bit worse than normal. She isn’t really sure what the cause is, but she prescribed albuterol treatments, which required us to pick up a nebulizer to actually administer the drug to Meg. She’s supposed to get the treatments a few times a day, and they take around 10 minutes to allow the albuterol to “nebulize” into her lungs. As long as you keep her entertained, she inhales most of the drug and you can definitely tell that her coughing gets more productive thereafter. Hopefully that helps her, too!
Meg turns 11 months this Saturday, which is a pretty crazy thing to consider. She’s obviously come a long way in that period, and as have we. While she’s still developing nicely, we’re still waiting on more teeth to come in (she has 1, solitary, lonely tooth…) and we’re waiting on her mobility to increase (she can scoot around and move from one side of the room to the other, but it isn’t really “crawling,” per se…). We’re anxious to see if this, the 11th month of her life, is when all the other teeth come in and whether she starts to take her first steps.
It would certainly be nice for her to be able to chew on her birthday cake in a little over a month. 🙂
The snow has started here. It began in earnest about 9 a.m. I sure hope the nebulizer helps Meg. Too bad she’ll miss water babies. We will just have to teach her here this summer!
oh and be careful out there