Baby Ear Cleaning

Miles and Vivienne have had stuffy noses for a couple weeks, but nothing very serious.  Yesterday morning, Vivienne was coughing a lot.  It was a dry cough, but it seemed like she just couldn't stop coughing.  We took her temperature (SO glad that we don't have to do this rectally anymore!!), and she didn't have a fever.  I called the advice nurse just to be safe.  The nurse recommended that we bring her in to get checked out.

So, I took both babies to the doctor's office by myself.  This really isn't a big deal unless one baby decides to have a bad day.  If one baby is crying, then I basically can't really hear anything that the doctor is saying to me.  Luckily, both babies were in a good mood.

While we waited for the nurse practitioner to come in, Miles and Vivienne proceeded to completely annihilate the paper that was covering the exam table.  Miles just wanted to rip it to shreds and flirt with himself in the mirror.  Vivienne just wanted to immediately eat as much of it as possible.  She has a refined palate for papyrus, apparently.

The NP wanted to check Vivienne's ears to be sure that she didn't have an ear infection.  She couldn't get a good view of Viv's eardrums, though, because there was ear wax in the way, so she had to clean her ears.  Of course, I was thinking,"Ok.  This will be easy.  Grab a Q-tip.  Do a little digging.  No big deal."  I was clearly wrong.  I had to hold Vivienne's arms while she stuck this long tiny Q-tip in her ears.  Honestly, Vivienne screamed louder than she has ever screamed for any shots or any other pain.  I had no idea this was going to hurt that much.

After the ear torture cleaning, the NP was able to see her eardrums.  The first ear (the one that she really screamed for), she said it looked slightly red, but she wasn't sure whether that would indicate an infection or whether the redness was from the torture cleaning.  The other ear looked just fine.

So, the test was inconclusive and I had a virtually inconsolable baby.  Even when I tried to nurse her, she just kept screaming and wouldn't eat.  She's never done that.  Poor baby, she just wasn't feeling good and now her ear was hurting.  The NP gave me a prescription and said that I should fill it if Vivienne's symptoms seemed to worsen.

Luckily, the hard morning was followed by lunch at the Chik-fil-a drive-through (I think I enjoyed that more than the babies) and meeting some dear friends at a playground to chat and play.