Sick Week

Warning : This post is somewhat descriptive and thus is not for the weak of stomach.

Well, that was interesting. For those of you who might have missed the Facebook and Twitter updates, everyone in our entire family had a bout with a nasty stomach flu bug this past week.

It all started on Monday when we noticed that Sam was acting unusually docile and lethargic as opposed to his normally chatty, active self. All of a sudden, he started puking everything contained in his system, and I mean everything. What didn't come up went out the other end quite forcefully. We felt really bad for the poor little guy. He was so miserable and started developing a fever. As soon as we felt he could actually keep it down, we gave him some Tylenol to tackle the fever without upsetting his stomach. After that, he would mostly just cuddle with us and lay there, inactive.

Brittny took the night shift and helped little Sam get through the night, but I really started to worry the next morning when I woke up to Brittny looking miserable in the bathroom. She asked if I could watch Sam for a little while, but that little while turned into the entire day as Brittny experienced the exact same symptoms as our son. So Tuesday was spent caring for my wife and child, which I was of course willing to do, but at the same time it carried a sense of dread. Here I was, noticing a highly contagious and fairly fast-acting flu bug starting to run it's course through the family. And since I needed to take care of them, I knew it was only a matter of time before it got to me, too. I can only be grateful that this didn't take us all out of commission all at once, or else we would have been in big trouble.

Just as is traveled to Brittny from Sam over the course of a day, I was next to be hit. That Tuesday night, I got hit hard. Just like the others, I ended up vomiting everything I had in me and spending a lot of time in the bathroom, but the unfortunate side of things for me was that the major symptoms lasted through the night, so I wasn't hardly able to sleep at all, even though I really wanted to. My memory of everything is pretty foggy since I was so miserable, but my Facebook status history tells me that I was up until at least 7:30am the next morning. I finally got to sleep for a good amount of time and was feeling much better by the end of the day. Though I must admit I had to slowly transition back into eating normal foods over the next couple of days.

While I'm glad to say that our family is pretty much fully recovered from the incident, it did cause quite a disruption in our long list of things to do. I think we've all gained a greater appreciation for our generally good health as a result of this experience, and hopefully we'll have better news to report in the weeks to come.

Our Cute Little Sam - Part 1

Well I promised in my last post to get an update on Sam up. I started writing it and couldn't stop writing about our cute little bug!  The post ended up being 5 pages long with no pictures or videos, which I decided didn't make for a very fun post.  So I'm going to work on breaking it up into a few different posts with pictures and get those up over the course of this week.  So here's part one, with more to come soon :)  These will be a little disorganized, but I just want to capture some of the cute and funny things that Sam is doing right now so that we can remember them later.  Sam is growing up so fast, and it's sad to realize how many things he's done that I've already forgotten!  He is an energetic bundle of joy and we're so glad to have him in our family.

Sam is really into climbing, and digging in dirt, and playing with sticks and rocks.  He LOVES to be outside.  He will drag me to the door every morning and try to convince me to take him outside as often as he can.  He also loves dogs.  I really don't know where that came from because he's never really been around dogs much, but he gets so excited when he sees a dog.  It doesn't even have to be a real dog, it can be a dog on a dog food commercial or the cartoon puppy on Wii Sports Resort.  Whenever he sees a dog his face lights up and he starts panting like a dog and making barking noises.  We haven't yet broke the news to him that we have no intention of having any pets in our household...

Luckily to counteract his appreciation of dirt - Sam loves taking showers with us.  One thing that's really funny is that he's picked up on what we do when we take a shower.  When we turn the shower on he reaches his hand up as high as he can to try to touch the water.  He's mimicking how we test the temperature before we hop in!  He knows that until the water has been tested he can't get in, so he's started doing it himself :)  Tonight Eric was also teaching him how to blow bubbles in the bathtub.  He hasn't quite gotten the hang of it, but it was cute to see him try.

We've recently started some preliminary potty training with Sam.  We don't have any expectations that we're going to get anywhere soon, but we're getting him used to the idea of sitting on the toilet.  So we bought a little potty seat and let him sit on there after we go to the bathroom.  He thinks it's fun to sit on there for a little while and to wave goodbye to the water when we flush it.  We try to explain to him what he's supposed to do while he's on there and so we modeled the grunting that he might do when he poops.  So now he grunts whenever he sits on the toilet, even though he's not usually pooping. We've had a couple of successes and we figure this at least paves the way for when he is ready.  One funny thing that he did was we pulled him out of the shower and I ran to go get him a diaper.  While I was searching for a diaper he walked over to the toilet, lifted the lid... and peed on the floor.  As much as we didn't really want pee on the floor, we were pretty impressed with the effort :)

Along with his potty training Sam now has one chore - to throw away his diapers after we change him.  He loves taking the wrapped up diaper from us and dunking it in the diaper genie.  He gets mad now when we do it instead!

So, there's round one of the Sam update.  Round two might be slower in coming since I'll probably have to take specific pictures to go with the rest of the items, but with how slow I am with updating - take what you can get!