Random Ramblings ~ Garage Sale & Baseball, amongst other things

     At 5:05am today, my phone alarm woke off. At first, I thought to myself "Haha. I don't have a real job. That alarm isn't for me. It's gonna be so nice to shut these heavy eyes and fall back asleep..." And then I remembered that I was participating in a garage sale today and I needed to get my butt out of bed and over to my cousin's house. {Well, my husband's cousin, but whatever, it's sorta the same thing at this point.} 

Hahahaha! I laughed at myself. And got out of bed. I almost felt... like I was wasted. I hadn't gone to bed until after midnight and the night before I hadn't gotten much sleep either. I think you probably know what I'm talking about. That I'm-so-tired-I-just-feel-not-right kind of feeling. :)

     I brought my camera with me to the garage sale but didn't take one picture. If I had, I would have known the battery was out and I could have charged it before we took the girls to the baseball game this afternoon. "Oh Coconuts!", as Magnolia would say. {She picked that up from Jake & The NeverLand Pirates.} It was the second game of the season, and the girls' first game this season. I was bummed because they looked really cute and were even posing for me as I turned on the camera... Boo. Oh well, we are season ticket holders and will go to another game. {I'll mention about that after the garage sale part.}

     So, Starbucks in hand I arrived at the sale before 6am and set my stuff up. My cousin, T-Bone {she calls me Pot Roast, it's a long story}, has three boys so she had tons of clothes to sell as well. To our shock and amazement, hardly ANY of the baby clothes were sold. In fact, of the 20 people that had shown up by 10am ~ only one of them had even taken more than a glance at the baby clothes. ONE. It was not a terribly successful garage sale as far as baby clothes went, but T-Bone was able to sell a bunch of their DVDs and other stuff. A friend of my cousin did show up with her baby & mother and they {well, the girl's mom} bought $21 of my stuff. Oh wait, and a guy did buy a pair of kid gym shoes for $4... So I made $25 total. :) I took the rest of the clothes home and we are going to try again in a few weeks. {With more advertising as far as baby clothes are concerned.} This will also give me more time to get stuff together.

      After the garage sale flopped, I picked up my sister and off we went back home. She was going to babysit Snowdrop so we could take the Big Girls to the baseball game. It was a giveaway day and we always like to bring the kids. Snowdrop can't come because of her peanut allergy. And I was a nervous wreck about the whole thing because I'm afraid we're gonna bring some peanut pieces in on our shoes and it's gonna kill my baby. {Yes, I may be paranoid but it's f*ing scary to think about how easily she could be in contact with it.} I saw my husband stepping on piles of peanut shells without even noticing so... I think I was worrying with good cause. :) 

     

     We are taking Snowdrop to an allergist on Thursday this week because we have SO many questions. They have a peanut-free section at the stadium... but is it still safe to go? There's an over 100 year old Black Walnut tree in our backyard. It's literally one of the biggest & oldest trees in our neighborhood. We're total hippies when it comes to these matters ~ We wouldn't feel okay cutting it down. That seems so extreme. Along the same lines, it'd be extreme for us to move to a different house to avoid this tree. What about food on the same shelves at the grocery store as peanut products... we have so many other questions about her peanut & milk allergies... It's all so confusing, scary, frustrating... I feel so, confined. I'll report back what we learn from the doctor on Thursday. :) 

We took the girls for ice cream after the game. Well, we left in the fourth inning because they were getting fussy and squirmy. We didn't expect them to last long, especially since we went to the stadium early to get the kids giveaway gift. Since the girls couldn't decide what to share, I let them get their own cones for the first time and they got really messy. REALLY messy. Ice cream was everywhere. Maybe I let them get messy on purpose but I'm glad they had to ride home in their diapers with their baseball game/ice cream clothes safely crammed into a plastic bag. Hubby promptly carried them upstairs and showered them...

....while I took all the covers off of all the car seats {which is seriously a bitch and a half}{anyone with three Radians across one bench seat knows what I'm talking about}. Junie "leaked" through her diaper. Between you & me {and the entire world}, I think she pulled her diaper aside to see what her pee looked like. {Groan. She's been having a lot of suspicious 'accidents' lately.} So now I had to wash her car seat cover. Which of course, leads me to clean all of them. And when I pulled the foam insert out from under the covers... they were STIFF. So... yeah, it was time anyways to wash them. It's still annoying as f* to take those covers off! :)

Potty Training... Magnolia. I am so proud of her!! She has NOT worn a diaper since... last Monday? Neither my husband nor I can remember the last time we changed a dirty diaper of hers. She has gone #s 1 and 2 on the potty, all by herself, no accidents (until yesterday when she peed on the floor in the bathroom. it was the first accident yet!)- not even at school! We didn't let her wear big girl un.die.s to the game today, just in case, but her Pull-up was dry as the desert when we came home. SUCCESS!! She is doing SOOOOO GREAT with going on the potty. Other than the game today (and bedtimes) she has only been wearing big girl un.die.s. It has seriously made a difference in my day not having to change her diapers. For real. It's been awesome. Junie is not really following suit. I know she will eventually. It's still frustrating.

I am going to the ankle doctor on Tuesday morning to have my ankle checked out. It's starting to look weird. Like misshapen. I'm sure I'm totally overreacting or seeing something that isn't really there. It just still hurts like a you-know-what and I need to make sure I haven't really messed things up. It appears to still be pretty swollen and I feel like it's turned at a weird angle. LOL. OMG. I realize how bizarre that all sounds. I'm going to the doctor and I will get to the bottom of this. :) 

And because I feel badly writing THIS HUGE POST without a picture... I just ran outside to take a picture (uploading straight from my camera to blogger) to show you what my middle seat looks like, after having taken the car seat covers off. 

Destroyed.

Okay. I guess it doesn't look that destroyed. I don't know. My camera must be magic or something because in real life it totally looks destroyed. None of those seats are strapped in.

     *le sigh* 

That'll be "fun" to put together tomorrow. 

Hope you are having a wonderful Saturday. Hubby is out at a bachelor party so that means I am free to Blog and watch The Bachelor's After the Final Rose. Yes, I STILL have not gotten to watch it. I don't even know who the next Bachelorette is yet! I had been thinking it would be the dentist from this most recent season. But she's still messed up over whats-his-face.... Brad. 

I totally did not mention in my Guilty Pleasures Vlog that I love The Bachelor/ette. 

I am too embarrassed to say anything else.

Ch-Ch-Changes

Getting used to this peanut and milk allergy has not been easy. We try to feed our kids mainly organic food ~ always when it comes to Meat or Milk, and more often than not for processed foods, and as much as we can for fruits & veggies. Organic Food? Not super easy to come by ~ not terribly hard either, we just don't have a large selection here. Organic Food that's Peanut-Free? Organic Peanut-Free Milk-Free Food? Yikes. I had a pretty difficult time at Whole Foods the other day. We also have a Trader Joe's but they didn't seem to have much themselves. Someone mentioned to me that there might be a small market here that caters to Peanut-Free. I need to check that out.

Hubby & I feel so badly for Snowdrop. We feel so guilty. For so long, like since she was a few weeks old, she had this terrible eczema. It was so bad. She sucks her thumbs a bit and they would always look SO raw, cut up, just gross and grosser every day. And her cheeks were always red, her arms covered in a dry rash... and now that we've cut out all these things from her diet (peanuts and milk, other than actual drinking milk) it's improved so immensely... it's just so unbelievable. The eczema is all but gone from her body. Amazing! We feel so guilty though, especially me. All the PB I used to eat for extra nursing calories... I feel so stupid. So responsible for this. All those times we gave her crackers, or bread, or cereal, or oatmeal, all laced with peanuts... I just feel terrible.

Did she feel sick all the time? Did she hurt? Was her common wheezing and general stuffiness actually her unable to breathe from a mild reaction to the traces of nut in her food? Will she grow out of this? Please God, let her grow out of this. For her own sake. Can she go to baseball games? Can we take her to other sporting events? Can she go to the grocery store? Do I need to Clorox the cart if she does? Instruct people not to touch her? Do I need to worry about kissing her if I ate a Resees while I was out running errands? When will this start to feel like normal?

I'm going to bed before I start thinking too much. :)

Allergies & Home Improvement Stuff

Allergies, allergies... Snowdrop's blood-work came back as positive for peanut allergy AND for a milk allergy! I guess it was a good idea to get her tested after all. ;) But I was right about the peanuts! OK so now we've been going through all the food items in our house that contain peanuts, or might contain peanuts, or was manufactured in a facility that also has peanuts, etc. I'm trying to get everything together in one spot. We don't want to throw everything out ~ that would be wasteful. At the same time, we're being SUPER diligent that our Little Peanut Lady, as she's come to be known around here, doesn't get any contact with that stuff. So we're eating off our peanut products as fast as we can, confining consumption of these products to our kitchen. Sometimes Snowdrop stands at the closed gate and looks in so sad eyed. Poor thing.

I'll be going grocery shopping this week and I'll definitely be reading every label, thrice.
{Thrice.} We took a look at cereals just to see and I can't remember if we found one cereal that didn't have peanut product in it! I know this is going to take a lot of getting used to. My mother-in-law is such a wonderful person. She has already outlawed peanuts in shells from the house {I think she secretly is pleased she won't have to pick up shell pieces from her floors! And I'm okay with that!} I know she has already cleaned their house twice since we found out ~ there will be nary a trace of peanut there. It's such a relief to know that I don't need to worry {which of course I will anyways...} about when we go over there. Obviously we'll always have our Epi-Pen on us in case of an emergency. My mother seemed a bit "burdened" by the fact that they'll need to avoid peanut stuff when we're in town... she's just going to need to get used to that.

I'll try to remember to bring my camera when I go to the store. It would be fun to post pictures of what I ended up being able to buy... and maybe of what I couldn't buy. I don't know. Would that be interesting to anyone? :) It's certainly going to be a change; Hubby thinks we'll end up spending more money. I'm not so sure. I know we'll be eating healthier because more processed foods are exposed to nuts than fresh foods and more "whole" foods. {This is from what I can tell. If anyone has information to contradict that, I would love to know! :)} So the silver lining, in my eyes, is that we'll be able to eat a little healthier and that will be very good for us.

So about the milk allergy. She always spat up as a baby ~ but that was never considered something abnormal, I mean, babies spit up right? So we never thought she'd be allergic to milk. She DOES have bad eczema but I never thought (neither did the the doctor) that it was allergy related. Anyways, so the doctor recommended we try a one week elimination of dairy products. So cheese, butter {ha, I don't feed them butter!}, yogurt, etc. Anything dairy related, except of course her actual drinking milk. This is to see if there is any effect on the eczema.

When we cut out peanut related products we noticed an immediate decrease in her eczema so I think cutting out most of her dairy intake will too. We just started that portion of it, I'll post about it again.

In Home Improvement News, we are adding open shelves into my kitchen. I'm very excited about this, and if I get my way we'll be adding them tonight! {Fingers crossed!} I'll post Before and After pictures of that. Our Dynex brand memory card reader is working out really well, in fact, it's actually less work to set up than the Handycam stuff. Score! That thing breaking was a blessing in disguise. :)

I guess that's it for now. Thanks to all of you who have linked up to Project365! Sometimes it's not easy remembering to take a picture every day! And it's great when others acknowledge my work, and share their work with me! So thanks! I sure do appreciate it! :)

Peanut Allergy, I tried to be short. Truly. I did.

Snowdrop has a peanut allergy. This information we know because I saw her have an allergic reaction to the peanut butter I fed her for lunch and then I had to fly to Walgreens with all three girls to save her from it.

Her doctor agreed with my description of the reaction and prescribed us a Peanut-Free Lifestyle, along with two Epi-Pens (one for home, one for Gigi's).

For the record, I love PB. I eat a jar of it every few months, just by myself.

Without question, I'd move to a peanut-free-state if I had to in order to keep my baby safe.

On the way home, I cried and cried. And then I embraced my germ-phobias and cross-contamination-phobias because it means all that phobia stuff, just prepared me for the attention to peanut-free that I'll need to be... In our home. In other peoples' homes. In public.

Snowdrop is lucky to have me as her mom, because I'm good at being careful. Better safe than sorry.

Of course, upon calling my mother to tell her what happened and upon telling my husband what happened, BOTH of them completely disregarded me and our doctor in full ~ my mother said she doesn't trust our doctor for not having Snowdrop allergy tested. My husband isn't willing to change our lifestyle because it's not "for sure" that she has the allergy.

Since when are the classic allergy signs not a "for sure".

Especially with peanuts.

Her reaction is for sure enough for me. And our doctor. You know, the lady who spent years earning a medical degree and learning these things so she could help patients like my children. I find it so degrading, so irritating, so offensive to the work I have put in as a mother, that my husband doesn't trust me OR her on this. Aside from all this, she didn't give a lifetime expiration date on this ~ she just said the next couple years and then we can try peanuts again. Two years. That's all. Two. 2. Dos. Deux. Not the rest of our lives.

Anyways, we're getting a blood test done tomorrow {and I'll post as soon as I know the results!}. Actually, WE is a little exaggeration. My husband, who can't stand to hear his babies cry and who hates the sight of blood, he gets to take Snowdrop in. He gets to hear her scream, he gets to watch the nurse stick her a few times until they find the right vein. And as much as I'd like for the test to show that she doesn't have an allergy to peanuts and that I'm wrong.... there's a tiny {okay, not too tiny} person inside of me who can't wait to introduce our new Peanut-Free Lifestyle to everyone involved in our life. You know, right after my middle finger goes up and I get my slice of Humble Pie.

I need a very strong drink.

{don't worry, i won't start drinking until naptime.}

{that was a joke.}

{really it was. i won't actually start drinking until the babysitter gets here.}

{teehee.}