The Trixie Update

Really, I think I’m dying. This is going to be a slooow week(s). I plan to get TPODs up, but that’s about it. In the meantime, let’s see how sick everyone else is. Do you or did you have BIDS*? Go vote in the new poll. (Poll is to your left under Latest TTU Comments).

*Baby-related Immune Deficiency Syndrome. For more information read the next post “Vector”.

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As reported in our last post, babies mess you up in the head. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to share their experience involving emotional instability and parenthood. However, I feel like I may have given the wrong impression once readers began leaving suggestions of which other movies not to watch. For the record, I want to state that there was never any chance I would watch Pay it Forward. This has nothing to do with having a child, I just lump it up there with other truisms such as don’t stick an auger bit in your eye and don’t make toast in the bathtub.

So sure, once you have a kid, you now get misty at the end of Old Yeller, but does it stop there? No. That’s easy to fix. Just get a Kleenex. The bad part is what happens to the rest of your body.

Jenn and I have never been sick as frequently as we have over the last 16 months. Actually, I’m sick as hell right now (which is why there hasn’t been a lot of activity on the site.) This is on top of two earlier bouts of super flu since Trixie was born. In the four years prior to her arrival, I only got sick once. Unless you count the two cases of pinkeye I got in my first month of moving to the Bronx. (That was before I learned not to touch anything in New York City.)

Jenn has also gotten horribly sick three times since Trixie’s birth, including a month-long case of something a just few genes removed from Spanish Influenza. (She also had a pretty good bill of health before Trixie.)

Is there a name for this condition? This rapid deterioration of a previously healthy adult once a baby enters the picture? My good friend Schaff, who has lost track of the number of times I’ve called to say, “I’m sick as hell right now,” has dubbed this condition BIDS: Baby-related Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Babies are not only purveyors of disease and pestilence — they weaken your immune system first by systematically denying you a good night’s sleep.

So without proper rest, you’re guaranteed to develop the worst possible case of whatever you come down with. But wait — there’s more! As everyone knows, disease thrives in crowds. When the host population is large enough for a disease to move around, lay dormant, incubate, and resurface, that’s when the really bad things happen. Plague, measles, flu, small pox.

When there were just two of you, it was easy to beat a disease. But once baby makes three, your host population has hit the critical mass. Now you all get to pass mutated strains around the circle. So there’s a good chance you’re not going to just get sick just once, but again, and again, and again. It brings the family closer together - just in time for the holidays.

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Trixie’s hair is getting a little out of control. We’ve never cut it and the darn stuff just keeps on growing. Normally I wouldn’t care, but it’s gotten to the point that, I swear, I think she’s running into stuff because she can’t see.

The quick fix is the barrette. It doesn’t take long to master hair barretting. I learned it in a few short weeks. There’s always the fear that you’re going to slice right into the scalp with that thin sliver of metal, but it rarely happens. Now I can barrette her in seconds, with little to no blood loss.

Trixie’s take on barretting is negative bordering on curious. In the beginning, there was no chance it was going to stay in her hair. 15 seconds was a record. Now she’s used to it and it might stay in for hours. However, she always eventually discovers the barrette. Her expression, as she slowly pulls it from her hair and hands the alien artifact to me, is one of perplexed horror. It’s the same look you or I would have upon discovering a Matrix-like socket buried in our skull.

So we’re thinking about making everybody’s life simpler by whipping out the scissors. Nothing too serious — just the bangs. What do you guys think? Help choose the future of Trixie’s hair in our latest poll (to your left under Latest TTU Comments).

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That’s the diagnosis. Our game of Mystery Rash entered the Lightning Round yesterday morning with little quarter-sized patches of rash popping up and then disappearing all over the place. I decided to go ahead and take her back to the doc to see what the heck was going on. I was surprised to find out that it’s hives. My money was on molting.

Tracking down the cause of the hives is apparently a difficult thing to do. It could be the way her body responds to this particular virus, or it could be an unrelated coincidence brought about by either food or environmental allergies. Either way it means it means she’s weak, WEAK like KITTEN. I’m going to drive down to the CDC in Atlanta so we can expose her to some real germs. She’ll build up her immunity and then she’ll be STRONG again — like BEAR. In the meantime, she’s on Benadryl per doctor’s orders. The best part? It causes drowsiness!! First time in 4 days that she slept through the night. Amazing. I think I’m going to go make some Benadryl popsicles.

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She definitely has the same crap that Jenn has been suffering with for the past 2 weeks. Trixie’s waking herself up in the middle of the night with a hacking cough (just look at the sleep log), and based on Jenn’s experience, her throat is sore and painful. We’ve already taken her to the doctor, but they didn’t see anything in her throat, and without a high fever present they aren’t going to do anything.

I thought we would have another chance to go back to the doctor today because Trixie developed an unknown rash last night. It was splotchy, red, had raised bumps and apparently was itchy. We noticed it at 7pm when it was about the size of a dollar bill centered on her stomach. By midnight, her stomach was completely clear, but the rash had spread like crazy all over her arms, legs, face and back. This morning it was completely gone except for a small area the size of a quarter on her thigh. Now, there’s no trace of her ever having the rash at all.

The way it spread across her body makes me think a food allergy, but she hasn’t had anything new to eat in almost 5 days. My other theory is that she’s molting. The worst part about all of this is the inability to communicate with Trixie. She can’t tell us one thing about how she’s feeling, or what specifically hurts. She can cry, of course, and howl, and scream, but that only takes you so far. Jenn was joking that we should just take her to the vet since all they do is work with patients that can’t tell you what the problem is. I’m just not sure if I should take her in on the cat side or the dog side.

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We’re taking a break from stories for this month (and maybe a week or so beyond.) But there will still be new TPODs (at least 5 days a week). September will be a good time to pick up the pace again.

So what do you have to look forward to in the new fall season? We’ve got some great story lines coming up. Here’s one — and this is pretty funny — Trixie is allergic to eggs. Can’t you just picture all the wacky misadventures that ensue? Like just last Saturday, when she vomited repeatedly all over her crib, stuffed animals and the rug. Boy - that was some crazy stuff. Or how it took her dense parents like 3 episodes over the past 4 months to finally figure out that the eggs were causing the vomiting? Sorry about that Trixie!! I still have egg on my face over that one!

Hopefully there will be more hijinks and less vomiting, but I have to work with what I’m given. Just thought I’d let you guys know what to expect.

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As we see in today’s TPOD, I can buy Trixie’s happiness by simply letting her hold my wallet. Like that will last. What everyday, off-limits, purse or pocket item is your baby most desperate to get a hold of?

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We’ve all heard about couples who are having problems and then decide to have a baby in order to save the marriage.* I don’t personally know anyone who has done this, so I don’t know how prevalent it really is, or whether it’s just an overused “Law and Order” plot device, but boy, what a phenomenally bad idea.

Having a baby to save a marriage? That’s insane. Nothing has generated more stress or worn us down more in our five years of marriage than the constant game of trying to adapt to Trixie. Hear me out: I’m not saying that we have tons of fights. I’m saying that the baseline conditions make it easy for tons of fights to erupt if you aren’t careful and loving and respectful of each other. (And even that’s no guarantee.) By extension, I think that if we weren’t doing well as a couple and then decided to have a baby, we would fight 10x as much in the new, now-with-higher-stress, post-baby environment. (I’ll admit there’s also a lot of love to balance out the stress, but since that’s the conventional wisdom, I’m not going to address it here.)

There’s no real reason that I’m writing about this right now.* Nothing is going wrong or anything like that.* It’s just that the idea about saving the marriage popped in my head recently, and the more I thought about it, the funnier it seemed. I almost think that you could do the opposite and have a baby to save a divorce. I mean, if you’re thinking about getting a divorce, but you’re on the fence and can’t commit — have a baby. That will seal the deal.

*BTW, this isn’t about Jenn and me. We feel like we’re a pretty communicative, understanding couple. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t subjected to the stresses inherent in taking care of a baby, or that I don’t regularly threaten to sneak out of the house and drive to Mexico.

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Trixie is messing up my metabolism. It’s a direct result of the new feeding schedule. We spend hours at the highchair now: breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack and dinner. And because you’re supposed to eat with your baby to reinforce the idea that eating is for everybody, I’ve been sitting down too. So I’ve gotten used to having all these tiny little meals spread throughout the day instead of just the big two (brunch and dinner) that I used to do. When it gets to be 4:00 in the afternoon, I can feel my blood sugar dropping, and I’m like, dammit, why is she still asleep? It’s time for vanilla wafers and apple juice.

Of course, this is messing up dinnertime as well. Jenn comes home starving, but I’m never that hungry for a big meal anymore. Plus, she gets upset because when I’m full, I’ve started pushing my peas around the plate and then throwing the whole thing on the floor in an exhausted fit.

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Well, I thought I hated mealtimes last week. As reported on Friday, thanks to the overwhelming advice posted here, we have turned our feeding operation around 180 degrees and now Trixie is only self-feeding. The fact that she took to it so quickly means you all were right on the money.

Over the weekend we’ve been giving her things like yogurt mixed with rice cereal smeared on toast and blueberries for breakfast; bananas, carrots from a can, cheese, goldfish crackers and sliced turkey for lunch; and frozen peas, macaroni & cheese, mashed sweet potatoes and veggie burgers for dinner.

Correspondingly, Trixie has managed to turn every single meal into an unbelievably insane mess. We’ve had to mop up the kitchen three times a day. Having survived one weekend of this crap, I can’t believe the results of last week’s poll. The top-ranked answer was “I LOVE feeding the baby?!!” Are you guys crazy? There’s clearly something I’m missing here. I think there would be less mess in the kitchen if I gave a plate of spaghetti to an orangutan and left the house for the weekend. We must be talking about different aged children or something.

Naturally, I want to figure out what’s going on, so I’m putting up a new poll to get to the bottom of this “I LOVE feeding the baby” thing. Together we can help fight baby mealtime! (Seriously, who has good advice about stopping messes?)

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