Update on Lily & Oli

Thanks again everyone. I am so touched by how many encouraging and concerned texts, e-mails, and messages we've received. Feeling truly cared for.

Enjoy the pics of the kids - for the most part they have little to do with the text, but fitting with the title of "an update" :)

Brad took Lily to the walk-in clinic yesterday and after an hour and a half wait, saw a doctor. Thankfully Lily was excited to leave the house and enjoyed the walk in her stroller to the clinic, so she was in good spirits - unlike the.whole.day.

The doctor confirmed my suspicions that she indeed has an ear infection. Hence the high fever the other day, and possibly even the pink eye. And definitely explains her intense irritability. She's now on antibiotics for 10 days that should clear up everything. In her other ear, though, she has a severe blockage of wax that may actually be affecting her hearing (and could explain why she's still not talking - something we weren't even worried about). Her doctor suggested a bit of an unorthodox approach (at least to us, though we're glad she wasn't too quick to prescribe another medication) - drop oil (of any kind, olive oil even!) into the blocked ear once a day for a week or so. That should soften the wax. We'll see what her family doctor finds when she goes in to see him in a few weeks for her vaccines.

SO thank goodness that all seems to be resolved. Something I can't believe I haven't blogged about yet is my little man sleeping through the night! Kind of. When I realized that he was approaching his 11th week, I decided enough was enough. From all of my readings, there's no reason that by his age he should be sleeping no more than 4 hours at a time. Yet he would always wake at 2:30am and sometimes at 5am too. So I decided to experiment... what if I wasn't giving him a chance to settle himself back to sleep? What if I was only continuing the problem by going to him at the first sound he made. Easy to do when he's in YOUR ROOM. I didn't want to wake Brad, I could hear him so clearly, I couldn't sleep through his whimpers, etc.

The experiment was that we'd put Oli in the bathroom that's off the kitchen. In between Lily's room and ours. A bit further from us, but still in hearing range if he was really belting it out. We'd close the doors, flip on the fans in both the bathroom and our bedroom. In this scenario we wouldn't hear whimpers, but we would hear real, prolonged cries. And we would also hear the same (and do hear the same) from Lily. So if one of them really needed us, we'd hear, but if not, we'd sleep, and Oli would learn to settle himself back to sleep.

AND THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED.

For 4 or 5 nights now, Oli has gone to bed at 11pm or 11:30pm and slept until 6am, 6:30am, or even glorious 7am. I've heard him at times, like last night at 2:30am because I was tossing and turning, but in all cases, after a short bout of crying/whimpering, he's gone back to sleep. 

Makes me wonder how long this could have been happening if he wasn't sleeping so close to us. We thought we didn't have any other options, since we know he'd wake Lily with even faint cries and aren't willing to have BOTH kids awake for no reason. But the bathroom with fan never occurred to us. Why else do we have two bathrooms if not to make one an impromptu nursery? 

So both kids are doing well. Lily is on the mend and Oli is thriving. Thank you Jesus.