Posting at half past four in the morning, with a sole hour of sleep under my belt and an unconscious baby on my lap. Why? Not insomnia, to be sure. Squiddle has been sick (fever/congestion/cough) since Wednesday, and just as he started to get better, Jazzy caught it yesterday. And you can't explain to a baby why he feels crappy and can't breathe. And the only place he seems to want to sleep in on someone....

Going to try to sneak back to the bedroom and see if "between Mummy and Daddy" is a close enough compromise that he won't wake crying. Again.

ETA: Nope. No dice. Apparently only the Mummy's lap/desk chair combo lets Jazzy sleep. Joy...

Still doing the shuffle of recovery. I (mostly) feel fine, but I sound like the living dead. Last night was fortunately better, as I had a guild meeting. Where I was voted and sworn in as Secretary for the next year. On top of running the Block of the Month and a Nine-Patch Exchange and sometimes helping out with Quilts For Kids. As one of my friends in the guild observed, "if you want to get something done, ask a busy person." Well, I expect it'll be good for me.

I'm also pondering which quilts I might want to enter in the quilt show in a couple months. Of the ones I've made and still have, there are five that spring to mind as maybes: the black/orange crane quilt, Wonderful Husband's flag quilt (the show's theme is "As American As..."), Squiddle's dinosaur quilt, Squiddle's sunflower quilt, and I need to pull out and get quilted the top from the round robin last year, since the show would like all those exhibited together if possible.

I'm four books behind in my blogging for the year, and currently working on my fifth, Rilla of Ingleside. I read maybe the first half of Montgomery's Anne Shirley books when I was younger, but I never got to this one, and I think it's a good thing, because I don't think I'd've liked it then. Now, it's interesting and I'm liking watching Rilla mature. Though the baby she's taking care of keeps taking me aback when she mentions things like him being exactly on track, weighing nine pounds at four months of age. Um. My babies were almost ten pounds when they were born. ^_^;; And they don't even hold the family record! I don't think I've ever held a baby that small.

Urgh. Only one out of the four of us slept well last night, and he's the one who has his own room. Nonetheless, stuff got done today including, yes, the purchase of two African dwarf frogs for the fishtank. Plus another bundle of plants for it - this time telanthera cardinalis. I'm figuring every couple of weeks I'll add a new species and a new plant to go with it, pulling out the plastic plants as I go. Of course, I'm only planning to add like two more species: some ghost shrimp, and probably some rasboras.

One thing that I wish I could find online is a tank stocking calculator. Something that says if you have this size of tank, how many fish you can you fit in it. With inputs for things like "I want X number of Y type of fish" where it will calculate their size requirements for you and do pop-up warnings if a type of fish will try to eat one of the others you've selected.

Also today I did get some more seeds planted. Sugar Pie pumpkins, Charentais melons, Minnesota Midget cantaloupes, Sugar Baby watermelons, rainbow chard, and jalepenos. Counting the popcorn seedlings this afternoon, it looks like I got somewhere around a 75% germination rate, which is not great, but also not terrible for a year-old packet. And that's why I planted the entire packet! Anyway, now I'm at the point where I need to fill more seed starter packs with soil. And research vegetative cloning of my surviving tomato plants....

Not much going on at chez Stonham since we've all fallen under the flu crud to varying degrees. Wonderful Husband took today as a sick day. And even Jazzy has a snotty nose and a nice chesty cough going! But none of it is worth a doctor's visit - fortunately Squiddle's fever broke Monday morning, otherwise we would've hauled him in for poking and prodding. And he was miserable enough as it was.

Unfortunately, however, the fact that we're all sick has meant no playgroups and classes for Squiddle this week! So he's been bouncing off the walls at times, which has drained me down further. Today, though, I'm hoping constitutes a turning point.

This afternoon, while both the boys were napping and Wonderful Husband was vidgaming, I did another session of "tame the kitchen garden." The dead bay tree was put in the brown bin for yard waste, as were the ginormous kale plants. The bin is FULL. No more yardwork until Tuesday, I guess. Though I need to examine the bottom of the pot the bay tree was in, since it died of drowning - the pot clearly needs more drainage holes before I use it again.

The hundred-and-seven popcorn plants just started peeping their heads up today, and the peas/spinach/radishes/beets/lettuce/carrots/whatnots in the one bed I've planted are all neatly sprouting. As are the onion sets at my parents' place that I thought wouldn't sprout, so goes to show what I know! Tomorrow we're due for more rain, which makes me happy, but... I'd kind of like a dry week so the back lawn and kitchen garden paths could get mowed. Ah well. Grass is always greener and all that.

I also did a 10% water change on the fish tank this afternoon and will probably add in a few more critters tomorrow. Likely either a couple African Dwarf Frogs or half a dozen ghost shrimp, depending on which one excites Squiddle more when we're at the store....

Sister had a CT scan this morning, which revealed an abdominal abcess. This was followed by surgery to deal with it. Hopefully, knock on wood, this is going to take care of everything! But meantime niecelet is going to be on formula again for at least 24 hours and my sister (possibly because of the infection) has not been producing enough milk for her. So tomorrow morning I'm going to put together and ship a relatively expensive care package of all the breast milk I've been sporadically pumping and freezing over the last couple months. I think part of the reason I've been holding off on taking care of donating it to Mothers' Milk Bank was maybe in case something like this happened...? In any case, not so good that she needs it, but good that I have it for my sister to use.

Squiddle and I got our flu shots today. Hooray! Me on the arm, him on the thigh. He was none too happy about it, but stopped crying within ten seconds of it being done.

I've been chugging along on the current quilting project as time allows. I'm a little over 10/25ths done with the center squares. I'd be further along but last night I hit one of those "if I was making this now, I'd know so much better" moments. Namely, I had fused some hearts on and then topstitched them down. Great. Brilliant. Except the fusible web I used gives my machine fits trying to quilt through what is essentially a layer of glue. So eventually I sighed, ripped out the three hearts' worth of quilting I'd argued, wrangled, and forced my way through, and will be redoing the square this evening, quilting around the hearts instead of on top of them.

Mastitis round two, all better. (Touch wood.) And Jazzy is now big enough that he no longer fits newborn outfits, so I'm starting to go through those and pull the gender-neutral ones to go to my sister. He has also finally bested Squiddle's sneeze record! Ten in a row. O.O;

SoCal has been in a heat wave the last couple days, so I've been taking the boys down to my parents' place. Tonight my parents are seeing Ringo Starr in concert. Squiddle was listening earlier as my mother relayed this information to my sister. He perked up and said "Rainbow!" Erm. Ringo. Rainbow. Much the same thing, really? ^_^;;

Up at 3am pumping milk to try and stay on top of this bout of mastitis. Touch wood, I think I'm winning - my temperature spiked to 101.9 then dropped back down to a more normal 98.1. Unfortunately, I'm still up at 3, draining out all the milk Jazzy didn't get to. :(

GDI.

After my appointment with my Ob-Gyn yesterday, which included a breast exam where she said I didn't seem to have any blocked milk ducts, guess what I have today? Yep. A blocked milk duct! Same side as the last bout of mastitis, even. Different area of the breast, though.

I'm staying on top of my allowed painkillers and trying to take care of this holistically again. Thus far my temperature hasn't gone up any, knock on wood....

On a brighter note, earlier today I was laying on the bed, waiting for the painkillers to take care of the flu-like whole body ache that seems to accompany mastitis, and Jazzy was laying next to me, asleep.

And he started laughing. In his sleep. My one-month-old! And when I looked to be sure it wasn't just hiccuping or weird snores or something, no, he was smiling.

I'm generally an agnostic and undecided as to what happens behind the scenery of the universe, but damn if that wasn't some creepy evidence to weigh in on the theory of reincarnation. My baby may be an old soul?

So last time, post C-section, I got an infection of the surgical incision. Which was painful, gross, disgusting, and required Wonderful Husband to deal with it because I literally could not even see the infected area.

This time, I have mastitis in my right breast. Which is an infection of the milk ducts. Just as fun and painful as it sounds like. Spent most of yesterday following nurse's instructions and trying to head it off via self-care, only to finally have to go to urgent care and be prescribed antibiotics. Feeling a world away better today.

On top of that, we got a surprise visit from Child Protective Services related to Squiddle's ER visit, yesterday. While I was on hold with the nurse line, waiting to be told what to do! But the CPS visit, at least, seemed to go well and she seemed to think the accident was a non-issue and they would be able to close the case.

To end this on a happier note, I've been rereading my posts from three years ago, and am glad I wrote them because it makes it easier, human memory being the fragile, malleable thing it is, to see the differences between Squiddle and Jazzy.

Jazzy, even at eight days old, is more fastidious than his older brother. He doesn't want to nurse if his diaper is even wet. And this despite being in disposables, which theoretically wick the wetness away, at the moment. And he prefers his nursies in two or three "courses" with a brief breather in between each. I do sometimes have to talk to him and remind him that nursies are tastier than fisties. But fortunately the thumb-sucking of the first couple days seems to've abated. Thumb-sucking is a hard habit to break later. I know. I was one.