Spotlight on Julia

My Pig-Tailed Princess

The blog spotlight has certainly been on Liam for the last few posts, but my little drama queen sure still steals (demands) the spotlight at home. At age 3, Julia is becoming wonderfully self-sufficient...not only does she insist on doing most things by herself, but she's now actually capable of doing them unassisted! Just this morning I came back from a run at 6:30am to find Julia happily awake, fully dressed and ready for school with her little sheet set for naptime and an extra set of clothes. She had already helped herself to a banana from the fruit bowl and didn't mind entertaining herself while I showered before fixing her breakfast. Of course not every morning goes so brilliantly, but it's nice to brag whenever it does happen!

In many ways Julia is a girly girl. She loves all things pink, carries her baby dolls everywhere and loves playing dress-up. One of her favorite games right now is to play mommy to Liam, especially putting him to bed (amazingly, he loves this game too...maybe I should let her have a go at putting him down for the night cause whatever we're doing isn't working!). She tucks him in, "reads" him a book, and even sings songs to him. Her other favorite game is hide-n-seek, though her version of it is actually count-n-find-me-where-I-told-you-I-was-gonna-hide. She is very interested in cooking, and she's actually becoming very helpful in the kitchen, helping to stir or sift or measure out ingredients. She told me that breaking the eggs is the best part of cooking, so making a quiche (with 5 eggs) was a huge hit the other night.

For all the girliness, though, Julia sure can keep up with the boys (even the big boys) when it comes to running and climbing and jumping. She races up play structures and climbs rope ladders with such speed and confidence (but fortunately has a healthy notion of danger too, unlike her little brother). She's already telling everyone excitedly about starting gymnastics again (in January).

I think my favorite of her interests is singing. She loves music of all kinds and has a really good memory for song lyrics (can't get her to do memory picture games at all and I've experimented with telling her grocery items to remember, but it seems to only apply to music). It keeps us really amused too because her song repertoire is really diverse. My iPod has a lot of children's music that we listen to often, but Julia also likes for me to just scroll through a couple of seconds of each song in the playlist (from Van Morrison to Counting Crows, Metallica to Bach) until she decides what she's in the mood for (Keb Mo singing "Better Man" is a current favorite). Matt has a very limited repertoire, but it ranges from "The Purple-People Eater" to the Dirty Dancing classic, "I've Had the Time of My Life" and even an Australian jingle from the 80's for the shampoo Decore (which Julia just calls "The Shampoo Song"). And Julia has learned at least the chorus to pretty much all of them. Since that seems to be the best medium to get her to listen, we sing A LOT around our house. Now when she gets annoyed with Liam invading her space, we all sing Sting and the Police "Don't Stand So Close to Me."

Pneumonia

As you can probably tell from the tired, sick eyes in the picture, our little man has not been well. We'd been having a really active week with new outings and a new playgroup, and the kids had been having a wonderful time. Liam has had a mild cough that he just can't seem to shake, but the doctor had said he was still getting over his cold and not to worry. So I didn't...until we were on our way home from the grocery store on Wednesday afternoon, and Liam started making a sort of grunting noise. Not to be crass, but at first I thought he was just "working on his diaper" (as my grandmother called it). We were only a few minutes from home, but it was clear pretty quickly that that wasn't it, and when I took him inside he just lay down on the floor looking really limp and pitiful. I called the doctor, put the kids straight back in the car and headed to the doctor's office (fortunately it's only a few blocks away!).

By that point it was obvious to me that he was having trouble breathing (breathing troubles and head injuries are my two major fears when it comes to childhood accidents and illnesses...2 weeks ago it was a mild concussion and then this?!? seriously, this boy is going to give me a heart attack!). While we waited with the nurse for the doctor, Liam's temperature spiked. The doctor said it could either be a "simple" respiratory infection or pneumonia. We were sent away with antibiotics and orders to go to the hospital if he got worse, come back in the morning he stayed the same, or say a prayer of thanks and continue the antibiotic for a week if he got better.

No sleep that night (or the next 4 and counting...) as I watched him and listened to his ragged breathing. No worse but certainly no better, so back to the doc the next morning where the doctor confirmed pneumonia. I'm a bit paranoid about hospitals (as in, I think you're just as likely to get sick as to get well there), and our doctor actually shares those feelings, so he upped the dose of antibiotic, added in a second one and got us on a strict routine of fever-reducers and sent us home (again with orders to go to the ER for any change). By Friday morning, his breathing sounded MUCH better and he actually started to perk up & play with some toys for a bit (I knew he was feeling better when he put on Julia's high-heeled princess dress-up shoes).

The doctor was very pleased with his progress and we were able to drop the meds down a bit (good news since they were not making his tummy happy), and we had a pretty good day on Friday. But as with most illnesses, we had a bit of a backslide on Saturday (see pictures above and below)...
Since he didn't want to be more than 2 inches away from me all day, I sat him on the kitchen counter and stood next to him while I fixed lunch. Within a few minutes he had stretched out and fallen asleep, ragged breathing and fever again. Not good. I called the doctor and gave a rare thanks for the Aussie medical system that lets doctors make house calls! Of course, the doctor then took nearly 5 hours to arrive and by that time (and 2 doses of antibiotics and a dose of Tylenol later), Liam was up and playing and breathing like a champ! Guess the bug just needed to raise its ugly head for one last hoorah (let's hope that's the end of it).

As an aside-- Liam has refused to sleep in his own bed since Thursday. I know I should just be thankful for his relatively speedy recovery, but I am really really hoping this is not a permanent side effect of the illness!