If it's not one thing, it's another...

Wow, it has been a long time. Since I'm not pumping at 2 a.m., I don't have my guaranteed blog time any more. I haven't really been getting that much more sleep, though. She does sleep 2-3 hours at a time, but some nights she's still up every 1-2 hours. Morgan's eczema is pretty well under control and her cradle cap is all gone. She has some hair now:

Just when I think I'm getting the hang of things, I see these red spots on the inside back of Morgan's leg. After a day or so, it was looking awful, so I took her to the pediatrician to have it checked out. They told me she had a staph infection. A staph infection?? I couldn't believe it. My poor baby! She didn't seem to even know she had an infection, thankfully, but I felt so bad for her. The pediatrician gave me some antibiotic cream and said if it didn't start to heal in a couple of days, to give her an oral antibiotic. After a couple of days, it looked different, but I couldn't tell if it was healing and I didn't want to start her on the oral antibiotics unless I had to, so I took her to see her dermatologist. He said it would be better to use antibiotic ointments, rather than creams, to avoid burning/stinging her skin, so he gave me a prescription. He also gave me one for a steroid ointment to help speed healing. He then said we could give her a short round of oral antibiotics to really accelerate the healing, so I agreed. When I got that prescription, it said to give her 3 tsp. for 3 days, then 2 tsp. for 3 days and 1 tsp. for 3 days. Um, that's a total of 9 days. I didn't think that constituted a "short" round of antibiotics. I called the office and they said to give her the medicine for 9 days. I gave her the first dose and 3 tsp. is a lot for a baby. It was 6 small syringes full. Ugh! Later that evening, I was going over the medicines with my husband and I realized that it was not an oral antibiotic, but an oral corticosteroid! Yikes! How did I miss that? I thought for sure the dermatologist said antibiotic. I was all worried and feeling bad because I did NOT want to give her oral steroids - even more than I didn't want to give her antibiotics. I called the dermatologist's office in the morning and asked if I could stop giving her the corticosteroid and they said it was OK. I just continued to use the antibiotic and steroid ointments. It's slowly healing, and I have to change the dressing 3 times a day. This is now on top of the normal eczema regimen.

We went to a friend's baby shower this weekend and we stayed at my husband's parents' house. Morgan was so happy to see them. She loves her grandparents:

At the baby shower, I got to see a lot of my friends that I hadn't seen in a while and their babies. One of those poor, sweet, precious babies somehow contracted hand, foot, and mouth disease and they didn't know it until after the party. Where do our babies get these things? You'd think we all live in a third-world country or something. There's also an outbreak of swine flu in a neighboring city and the whole school district is shut down for a week. I have to keep an eye on my baby's staph infection, and keep an eye out for hand, foot, and mouth disease and swine flu! Sheesh!

Despite it all, she continues to be her happy self. Here she is working on sitting up like a big girl:

I'm so glad she's such a smiley, happy baby. All of these things would so much harder to bear if I thought she was miserable all the time. Keep on smiling, Morgan!