Sick Baby

Round one of the cold virus swept through our house this past week.  With the number of little ones around here, and one now in school, we are bound to catch a few.  Since Daniel is breastfeeding, he is covered by my immunities - meaning that if I have had a virus in the past, and developed an immunity to it, I pass that immunity through my milk and he is also immune to it.  Pretty neat, right?  When Daniel started to get sick a few days before I did, I knew I was hit.  Sure enough, everybody caught the cold.  It wasn't particularly horrible, but everybody had a few bad days.  Daniel, unfortunately, started wheezing and really struggling to breathe.  I was hoping and praying that he would not have the same issues as Eli and Isaac did in their first year, but after a visit to the pediatrician, he was also sent home with nebulizer treatments. 

 

Isn't that the saddest thing you've seen in a while?  Poor baby!  Sometimes he chills out for his treatments, sometimes he tries to lick the mist, and sometimes he goes absolutely berzerk and puts up a pretty good fight.  The fighting is actually good, it gets the medicine deep into the bottom of his lungs.  I never took pictures of Eli and Isaac being nebulized, it always broke my heart.  But it is the reality.  I pray that Daniel will outgrow this, just as the other two boys have.   Prayers for his healing, for no further complications with this cold, and for the health of his lungs are welcome! 

Unintended Outcomes

Sometimes it's not so easy to understand why certain things, especially things we perceive as bad, happen.  This morning I had an interesting sequence of events that illustrated this quite well.  It starts with two things being forgotten.  1) I forgot to get milk last night.  2) Chris forgot to bring in the recycling bin, which stays in the garage behind the van, and requires the van to move to be put back.  So this morning after Daniel ate, I decided to run to Meijer super quick before Chris left for work to grab some milk.  Chris asked me to take the van, so he could pull the bin in while I was gone.  Great plan.  I go out to start the van - and it will not start.  It was making some kind of noise, but not a starting noise.  I run to get milk with Chris' car, and realize that I have to take Daniel at the pediatrician's office this morning for his 4 month check up.  Which means I need the van, because all of the kids have to go with me.  Gr.  Chris was able to go in late so I could take Daniel in the car to the doctor.  My van is still dead, and waiting for the tow truck to arrive.  That's sad.  But I didn't have to wrangle 4 kids in the tiny pediatrician's office, one of whom was getting shots and needed his mama's full attention and comfort.  If Chris hadn't forgotten the bin, and if I hadn't forgotten the milk, I'd have loaded all of the kids in the van just 20 minutes before I needed to be at the office and then found out the van was dead.  That would have been bad. 

While my van is dead, and that makes me sad, my stress level today was significantly reduced.  I'll take that unintended outcome any day!

It's hard to know how God is working sometimes.  Did He design this situation?  Or did He just create two forgetful people and match them up with a vehicle that would, as they all do, die once in a while?  It's interesting to ponder.  I do believe that trusting God is the key in any situation that happens that we just can't understand.  From our perspective, whether it's a dead van that will probably cost way too much to fix, or a person we don't believe in or care for being elected president, it's good to step back and acknowledge that our human perspective is very limited.  We can't see what has been, we can't see what will be, and we can't know the outcome if another course of action had been taken.  Since God stands outside of time, and since His perspective is very different than ours, sometimes we just have to trust Him - and be content in the face of outcomes we don't much like. 

Daniel's stats: He clocked in this morning at 15 pounds 5 ounces, and is 24.5 inches long.  He's super happy, smiley, and developing very well.  :)