The good news... apparently babies can handle much higher fevers than adults. So we gave her some baby tylenol and wiped her down with a cool wash cloth. Her Grammy & Grandpa hooked her up with baby menthol wash and rub along with a plug-in vaporizer and spa treatments on the bathroom floor soaking in the hot steam of the shower. Thank goodness for them!
We called our friends and cancelled plans... I waited until the very last minute in hopes that things may turn around for Aliyah. I wanted to take her to Sesame Street so badly because I knew she would just love it! I went with my childhood best bud, Jordan, when we were young and I would have loved to take Aliyah. I still have high hopes for next year!
Having a sick child makes us feel so scared and helpless. I have cursed myself on more than one occasion over the fact that my squeamish stomach and fear of needles ruled out any early aspirations for a career in medicine. If I was a doctor or a nurse - at least then I could do something - take some sort of action to help her. But instead Tyler, her grandparents and I were running around trying to fill sippy cups with cool water, searching through online baby encyclopedias for the chapter on fevers/coughing/wheezing and taking Aliyah to the bathroom for steam breathing treatments... all in a bit of panic.
There have been so many times on our parenthood journey where we’ve looked at one another and asked “What do we do now? What does this mean? How do we fix it?” and every time we’ve had to find our way to an answer through trial and error, calling on those who know more than us (doctors, family, other experienced parents) and praying that the choices we make are the right ones.
Before parenthood, I had never been faced with so many new challenges and foreign situations in my life. There is always something new to learn, something difficult to overcome… be it small things like teaching our daughter to put her toys away when she is finished playing with them or big things like coughing so hard that she becomes out of breath & sky-high fevers. It’s exhausting and reassuring when we find our way to an answer and we make it through another day. If we can get this little girl, and her future sibling safely and happily to adulthood without too many miss-steps and wrong turns I’ll consider this entire journey a success.
And along the way, we’ll keep adding to our list of “Things we now know how to do” or more accurately “Things we now know how to do... as best we can” We’ve come a long way in a year and a half's time, but we have so much left to learn!
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