Well, not quite, but close. Mireya is steadily improving now and that is a huge relief. Her fever broke last night and has not returned since. She still looks tired and pale, but her congestion and attitude are improving too.

Jason and I are wondering if she is just a kid that runs really high fevers every time she gets sick. It is really bizarre, but perhaps true? Regardless, I am so glad that she is getting better and I cannot wait to have my happy healthy girl back. Her sassy spunk had been back this morning and it is great!

Mireya starting running a low fever two days ago, but it was intermittent and she seemed fine. Unfortunately, each night she has had nightmare after nightmare and been miserable. By today her fever is getting more consistent and higher. She’s also feeling much worse. She has no real symptoms of anything, so I don’t know what she could be sick with.

Does this sound like deja-vu to you too? It wasn’t too long ago that we had the fiasco where Mireya had a really bad fever for weeks and weeks and the doctors had no idea why. It eventually broke and she got better, but we never got an answer as to why she was sick in the first place. It was very traumatic for all three of us and we have a huge fear of history repeating itself.

What do we do? Add to that the debate of whether or not to give her something for the fever and the misery. We’ve been alternating ibuprofen and Tylenol, but I hate to medicate her and doctors don’t recommend it. The alternative is worse though, because she clearly feels better after a dose of medication. Ugh.

I HATE this. I HATE that she is going to get sick as a child until she develops immunity to things. I HATE that she can’t tell us exactly what’s going on. I HATE that I’m her mother and I want to be able to fix everything and I can’t always. I HATE worrying that I might be missing something or not doing enough. I HATE the unknown, the unexpected and what I cannot plan for. I just want my sweet baby girl to feel well and be happy always.

No, no one is angry or upset. The one slamming doors at our house is Mireya. She has decided that every door in the house needs to be shut at all times. She shuts the office door, no biggie. She shuts the pantry door with me in it, a little annoying. I open the pantry door, so that I can continue to get my baking ingredients set out on the counter and when I step away for two seconds, BANG, she shuts it again. I made cookies last night and she shut the door in between every ingredient until I put my foot in the door. That was the end of the world apparently, because then she threw herself onto the ground and screamed and wailed for five minutes! Joy.

She also likes to shut our two cats in various closets and rooms around the house. I will realize that I haven’t seen one of them in a few hours, which is highly unusual. I’ll look around and lo and behold, they are in the coat closet shredding my scarves out of frustration, because they’ve been locked in there for who-knows-how-long. I have also seen my daughter close doors on the cats. Poor Sparty will probably have a brain injury by the time Mireya grows out of this phase if she keeps slamming the door on his head. She even closed the shoe box he was sleeping in yesterday and then she SAT on top of it! It caved in and when I pulled her off, she threw a huge tantrum. Peachy. I opened the box and poor Sparty looked at me like, “What the hell just happened!? Are you trying to kill me!?” He avoided Mireya and the shoebox for quite a while.

Mireya also enjoys shutting the door on me and Jason. She shut it after he stepped outside and locked him out in the snow. He was thrilled, I tell you! She shut it on my barefoot recently too. OUCH! Oh, and she shuts herself in places and then FREAKS OUT when she can’t open the door again. If we put those handy little door stoppers for toddlers on the hinges, she tries to slam the door only to have it rebound back into her. They aren’t exactly a good baby proofing item when they smack into your child’s nose and knock them on their butt.

When will this phase end? Seriously people! I don’t know if I can take anymore doors slamming. She also throws them open and we have dents in the walls where the handles hit. She has really mastered the art of SCREEAAAMMING when we try to prevent her from slamming the doors.

IT

IS

WONDERFUL…

and FREQUENT.

I enjoy the screaming sooooo much. Speaking of which, I hear her now….

Mireya has a built-in alarm that notifies her immediately if I’m doing something important and I need to be left alone. It must have gone off loud and clear for her, when I went into the office to do my schoolwork tonight, because the next thing I knew she was banging on the door saying, “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” Umm… distracting much!?

She is so cute and I want nothing more than to snuggle her in the evenings, but I know for a fact that if I had been out there with her, she would have completely ignored me. The only reason she wanted me, was because I was busy. I know all children do this, but I fail to understand why.

Examples: If I go into the restroom, she’s banging on the door needing me immediately or the world is going to end. (My bladder has developed anxiety!) If I answer the phone, she wants to scream in my ear (and the ear of whoever I happen to be talking to) right up until I get off the phone, and then she gets busy playing quietly with her toys. When I try to start lunch and I need both hands, she is desperate to be held. NOW. Right NOW! If I need two seconds to do anything, she had ten things she needs that she didn’t need, well, two seconds ago.

I was doing my morning stretches, and Mireya was doing them with me. She also gave me a neck rub (she sees Daddy do it) and then climbed all over me like a mountain goat. After she accidentally kicked me in the nose, I pretended to be asleep all curled up on the floor. She stared at me for a second and then grabbed her blankets that she brought out from her crib this morning. She covered me up with the blankets and said, “Nice.” I then heard her run off down the hall saying, “Sara! Sara!” She wasn’t able to pull Sara out of her crib and then she shut the door to her room and couldn’t get out. I rescued her and Sara and then laid down in the living room again. She handed me all her blankets and Sara and I pretended to sleep. As soon as she was sure I wasn’t looking, she started to climb onto the coffee table, which she knows is a no-no! I told her to get down and she told me to nap. Everytime I pretended to nap, she would start to climb up onto the coffee table! What a naughty, and very clever, girl! What a cutie!

Sara

Sara is Mireya’s favorite! She has gone to sleep holding her tight every single night since she started sleeping in her crib. In fact, all hell would break loose if she couldn’t have Sara at night. Heaven forbid we ever lose her! {Side note: Sara used to have a teddy bear attached to one of her hands, but it fell off and I never sewed it back on… She also used to have a knot tied in her hat, but it came out in the wash and it’s 100% impossible to tie it back in. Thankfully, Mireya got past both issues. }

Sara Kisses

I forgot to post about Mireya’s traumatic afternoon on last Wednesday. It was awful! Jason was out of town and I was putting together a crock-pot dinner. Mireya was playing with some of her toys on the kitchen floor in front of the dishwasher. She was 2-3 feet from me and I was keeping a close eye on her. She was happy as a little clam and every once in awhile she would get up and get new toys and then bring them back to play again. One of those times, she went to get up and all of the sudden she screamed. I looked over and she was holding her ankle and crying, so I assumed that she hit it on the dishwasher or the cupboard.

She gets hurt all the time, you know, minor bumps and bruises because she’s always running around like a nut and she usually just says, “Ow!” After I kiss it better she’s fine. I knew from her cry that she wasn’t fine this time. I got her blanket and Violet, her stuffed bear that makes owies better and I was going to rock her in the rocking chair. I wanted to get a look at her ankle and I immediately saw blood and a long hole in the back of her sock where her achilles tendon is. I took her into the bathroom to rinse it off and I could see that it was really bad. I thought she might need stitches. I was just hoping that her tendon wasn’t nicked!

She must have cut it on the dishwasher. It’s stainless steel and it wraps underneath, but the edge that’s only a little off the floor, is very sharp. No one but a tiny person could possibly get cut on it, and get cut she did.

I realized that I had to find a way to cover it and stop the bleeding so that she couldn’t mess with it on the drive to the doctor. I wrapped it in sterile gauze and medical tape and rushed to the doctor. Honestly, from the time she got hurt to driving out of the driveway, it took maybe three minutes. It’s amazing how you can think fast and move quickly when your baby is hurt!

They examined her at the doctor and said that it was deep enough for stitches, but due to the angle of the cut and the fact that it was right where she was going to bend it all the time, they opted to glue it shut. They padded it really well and then wrapped it. It took several nurses to hold her still, plus me, and I sang lullabies the whole time. It was so sad! I hate it when she gets hurt, but this was a new one for me. In the end, she was totally fine after they gave her a popsicle, but I was honestly shaken. One of the nurses who has two small children gave me a mommy pep talk. She reminded me that I can’t prevent everything and that I did the right thing. It’s hard not to blame yourself as a parent, even when you know that there is nothing you could’ve differently and you can’t predict random accidents. I still feel bad though.

She’s almost completely recovered by now. It will probably scar, but it’s healing really well. She still complains that it hurts, but I think it’s more her remembering the pain now. The wrap is off and she just has a Tinkerbell bandaid. It’s so scary

Mireya was feeling alright by yesterday evening, so we put her in her adorable sea otter costume and we went trick-or-treating!!!!! IT WAS SO MUCH FUN! She went with a few of the neighborhood kids that she’s friends with and she really did have a blast! She was beyond cute running behind the kids, trying to keep up and fending off a neighborhood boy who is her age (he was fascinated by her!) Her little sea otter tail was dragging behind her and her little butt was wiggling. She was always the first one to run up to the door and greet whomever came. She would get her candy and then come running to show us. Her little face was so filled with excitement! I was smiling so big my cheeks hurt!

SHE IS SO CUTE!!!!

Here are some photos of her cuteness:

Halloween morning SURPRISE! Her trick-or-treating pail and a stuffed witch.

She LOVES the witch! XOXOXO

I LOVE her!!! XOXOXO

Ready to go, but we gotta play the drums first!

She wanted to trick-or-treat at our house first.

Heading out the door!

The first house!

Isn't that a cute tail?!

Checking out her candy haul!

Stuffing her mouth FULL of candy! YUM!

Here’s a video we took before we left:

Jason went out of town last week for business and one of the people who he works with showed up with a horrendous cold. WHY!? He even joked that they were all going to get sick and take it home to their wives and kids. Guess what jerk-wad!? Jason did! He’s been miserable for days and by tonight both Mireya and I are sick. Hence the, “NOOOOOOOO!!!!”

Tomorrow is Halloween and Mireya has the cutest costume! She was going to go trick-or-treating tomorrow as a sea otter. Now that she’s sick she isn’t going to be able to! It was going to be her very first year trick-or-treating!!! *sob sob sniffle*

Here’s what she would’ve looked like:

A little blurry, I know. You try getting a toddler to pose for a picture!

The Author of this post is Solomon Dejesus

When I got Security Choice my daughter was told she could get a dog since she’d been asking and I figured there was no better time than now since we were already kind of exposed out here on this farm. The lab she picked out was adorable if not flawed since he only had one eye and kind of walks with a limp. We named him Gimpy, of course, and now he is as big a part of our family as any of the people and we spend most of our days and conversations talking about him! He’s not exactly the most effective guard dog since he can barely see but he barks at pretty much anything and everything which is thankfully fine since we live out here all alone. He loves having all this farmland to run around on although with the limp he doesn’t do all that much running! Anyway, my daughter’s happy and if she is then so am I – I think it was the right decision to get a dog after all!

Mireya got to try candy corn for the first time today! We bought some autumn mix and I gave her some. She promptly ate all the white and yellow tips off of the regular candy corn, the brown off the chocolate kind, and the green stems off the pumpkins. She then handed me the sticky, sucked on orange pieces and asked for more. I have no idea why she refuses to eat the orange parts. Strange little monkey!