Also, you could put her in a baby seat, and take her into the bathroom while you shower. The moisture might help her.

Great excuse to take a long, hot shower! It's good for the baby!

Poor wee snuffler and parents.

Also, you could put her in a baby seat, and take her into the bathroom while you shower. The moisture might help her.

We found this helped SO MUCH with Em. It loosened things up in there and made it easier for her to breathe. Also, I swear by the vapor bath stuff now. [link]

I cut myself peeling ginger

See, this is why I don't cook. It's dangerous!

Poor Matilda. Poor Matilda's mom. Feel better, both.

FWIW, it's really just a cold for Matilda. She's not even running a fever.

It's just tough with little babies when they get sick because you can't communicate with them, and their woes seem confoused and irritated.

Of course, we were still fully sleep deprived last night.

Matt's at his first day a little ma~~ his way - he seems a bit confused by the chaos. He is forgetting all the other jobs he has ever worked at . Matt is really good at walking into chaos and creating order.

It's just tough with little babies when they get sick because you can't communicate with them

Yeah. They're so new at this! You can't tell them it's okay, the bad thing will go away soon. Anyway, if it's not in like 2 minutes it's not "soon" for a little baby. She's only been here ... what, four months? it all blurs together for me - if she has a cold for a week, that's like 5% of her whole life! That would be like me having a cold for three or four months straight. (I suck at math. I'm probably wrong.) And she doesn't know it's going to stop - the first bad thing that happened to her, when she was removed from the warm soft floaty place and put, well, here, heck, we're all still waiting for that to go back the way it was, so maybe when something bad - like a stuffed up nose - happens to a baby, they figure it's just going to be that way from now on. No wonder they're pissed about it. ... Kinda the way I felt about puberty.

I'm just rambling on. Work is boring, so I'd rather think about being Matilda.

First day~ma for Matt!

Oof. Poor 'Tilda. Poor sleepless parents.

And I think I have to change jobs - my boss (who started when I was out recuperating from my stroke) has made it clear she's not happy with me or my work. I'm not sure if she's TRYING to kill me or if that would just be an additional benefit.

Egads. I hate that kind of awful working relationship. The boss needs to back the fuck off.

Work is boring, so I'd rather think about being Matilda.

JZ also.

I always think of Emmett's first stomach virus. Not just because he had stuff flying out of both ends at the same time and I just held him over the tub. But his baby sense of confusion and outrage that this was happening to him. It was horrible! You can't explain a stomach virus to a baby!

But helping them through those early physical ailments does a lot to build trust with your kid.

God, I know it's totally rude to just jump in and post a big memememe post without even responding to others' posts, but I'm doing it anyway. Mea culpa.

I just skipped over 300 messages (and I think I'm more than 1,000 behind in Natter).

The stress not only continues, but has been amped up in ways that would be comical if they were happening to a TV character.

(1) In addition to being on the PR committee of my group, I'm also on the membership committee (the group is so small that anyone who is willing to help out gets put on pretty much every committee, whether they want to be on them or not -- and so this means that jackhole!Group President is a part of every committee).

The long and the short of it is that there was a VERY tense, VERY uncomfortable 4-hour-long membership committee meeting on Saturday, one of the highlights of which was jackhole!Group President saying that "volunteering to help run the group [i.e., on committees, etc.] is a REQUIREMENT of membership." Someone else pointed out that if it's a requirement, then it's not exactly "volunteering." A shouting match ensued.

The Boy and I went out to dinner with another couple afterwards, and we spent another 4 hours just venting our frustration and anger, etc. The thing is, all that venting didn't help. I'm still stressed. And pissed that something which is supposed to be FUN (fun, goddamn it) has turned into the Death March of Bataan.

(2) I come into work this morning, with an already-unreasonable deadline breathing down my neck, and my computer is dead. Totally dead, as in will not even turn on.

Much flipping out ensues, as I am already stressed beyond normal limits this morning (see #3, below), and bitchy!co-worker snarks at me, calls me "helpless," and generally pisses me off so badly that I tell her to back off or I'd be whipping my bowl of oatmeal at her head.

And she even knew about reason #3, and still was a first-class cunt to me.

(3) Dad is in the hospital again. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but no. Or maybe it's just that he WAITED 2 WEEKS TO SEE IF HIS CHEST PAIN WOULD GO AWAY before going to the hospital. And of course he drove himself (because the ambulance won't stop at Burger King t /Christopher Titus ) yesterday. They couldn't find an ICU room for him, so he had to stay in the ER for over 24 hours, where the staff didn't even give him all his meds last night. It's like he's in Goddamn Kabul General Hospital.

So while the chest pain itself isn't overly stressful (just *normal* stressful), the fact that my 4-heart-attacks-quadruple-bypass-heart-disease father is getting CRAP TREATMENT -- yeah, THAT stresses me right the fuck out.

Think about that -- bitchy!co-worker knew all of that and still acted like Satan's butthair to me.

However.

My computer is fixed (it needed an internal battery, which is an easy fix), and I only lost hours, not days. Of course, now I'm rushing to meet the deadline, because god forbid we push the deadline back due to, I don't know -- LACK OF A COMPUTER.

Dad finally got put in an ICU room about 2 hours ago, though he hasn't gotten all of his morning meds yet. So he's batting .500 in Kabul General. The EKG and blood tests showed negative for a heart attack, which -- yay, obviously. The cardiologist actually thinks that his chest pain isn't due to a blocked artery, but to the VERY high dose of Lipitor he's been on for the past 4-5 years. Apparently that's a common side effect. Now, to be fair, the high doses brought his cholesterol down from the mid-to-high 200s all the way to 109. But, given that 109 is quite quite QUITE good, maybe it would be okay to lower the dose.

So Dad's having a stress test (ha! embrace the irony) this afternoon, to rule out a blocked artery or anything else.

So, again, yay. This is good.

Still, I can't FUCKING HANDLE all this stressful shit being thrown at me all at once, damn it! Even though now 2 out of the 3 stressors seem well under control, my adrenaline is still way up in the "flip out like a (continued...)