L had her one year appointment yesterday.  I’d been really on the fence about which, if any, of the three recommended vaccines to get her.  The three are Hap A, varicella and MMR.  I intend to get Isla fully vaccinated per recommendations, and she was up-to-date prior to her one year appointment, but MMR is notorious for side effects ranging from mild fever to other much more severe and sometimes permanent effects, though the latter are, of course, very rare.  On the flip side, while measles is also very rare these days, it does have a 1 in 1000 fatality rate, which is nothing to sneeze at.  One of my earliest memories, actually, is when my sister and I got the measles as young children.   Anyway, in the end, I decided to get MMR only and delay Hep A and varicella.  We’ll catch up on the other two over the next few months.  So far, so good, but in the past, it has been a couple days before she’s spiked a fever in reaction to her earlier vaccines.

L weighed in at 17 pounds 5 ounces, which is right at 20%.  She’s consistently been at the 20th percentile for weight since she was about one month old.  Her height is 29.5 inches, or 80%.  She’s also consistently been at the 80th percentile since she was about one month old.  Consistency is good!  The doctor seemed mildly interested in the fact that she isn’t walking yet, which I thought was a little odd given that it’s my understanding that it’s very common for children not to walk until they are older than one year.  B apparently took his first steps at 13 months.  My mother seems to have no memory whatsoever of almost anything I did as a baby, so I have no idea when I walked, talked, or did anything else.  B’s sister, who is adopted, apparently walked at 7 months!  His brother, on the other hand, didn’t walk until he was 15 months.  It’s amazing to me how much variation there is!  His sister ended up being a great athlete, so her early achievement was somewhat predictive.

B and my MIL are both leaving tomorrow.  B will be back Thursday night late, so I’ll be on my own with I for 3.5 days and 4 nights.  This is about the typical length of his business trips, and by day 3, I’m usually pretty tuckered out.  However, as long as I stays healthy, it’ll be all good.  Yesterday, she was not feeling well, and basically either B or I held her the entire day.  I was feeling pretty awful also, so it was a very long day for all of us.  The way things went for me in my illness was rather strange.  I felt completely rotten one day, then OK the next, then rotten again, and today hasn’t been so bad.  I’m really hoping that I does not follow a similar pattern as that would put her feeling ill again tomorrow, which would be a little rough given the aforementioned business trip.

(I really need to start calling her something other than “I.”  T for toddler?  D for daughter?)

We had a very low-celebration for I’s birthday today, one day early.  I thought about having some people over, but with both she and I feeling under the weather, I decided to abort, so it was just the four of us.  We did cake, hats, and presents.  She got beautiful Haba blocks from my SIL, a very nice pushcart with a toddler size handle from my MIL and a book from me.  (I also gave her the wooden stacker a couple weeks ago, which was really a birthday present.)  I have been enjoying playing with the blocks all evening.  She likes them as well.  It is really a rather small set which I think would nicely complement a larger, plainer set.  When Isla starts stacking them, I’ll think about expanding her collection.  She has started putting things in boxes (as well as taking them out), but so far, she is mostly interested in knocking things over, not building them up.

I made the cake and icing from scratch based on a recipe from Smitten Kitchen.  The result was tasty but not amazing.  I picked it because it was relatively low in sugar.  The icing was sour cream based.  Isla liked it, but not as much as she loves my sparkling water.  That stuff is the nectar of the gods.

I am still dealing with this very unpleasant cold.  I feel like such a whiner complaining about a cold, but it seriously surpasses anything I’ve dealt with in a while.  Basically, I’m dealing with the reality of a fairly minor illness while unable to stay home from work – or even go in late.  What’s worse is that the baby seems to be exhibiting some symptoms this morning.  I really, really hope she doesn’t get it because I can’t imagine how unpleasant it would be to deal with a bad cold when (a) you don’t understand why you feel bad (b) you don’t know when, if ever, you’ll feel better and (c) you can’t blow your nose and (d) you can’t take any medicines!  One other factor that has made things a little more difficult for me is that since I’m breastfeeding, the medicines I should take are somewhat limited.  Dayquil and Nyquil both contain active ingredients in the L3 category, which means that they haven’t been shown to do any harm to the baby, but they haven’t been shown not to, either.  I did give in and take Nyquil after the baby was sleeping a couple nights ago.  The nasal spray B loves also has an active ingredient in the L3 category, so I’ve mainly been taking Advil (for my sinus headache), rubbing Vicks on my lip, and just waiting for the cold to pass, as I’m sure it will in short order.

B’s mother is here, making this week two of relatives staying with us.  I added it up, and we’ve had more than 2 months of visitors in the past year, most of whom stayed in our house.  I am still burned out, though it’s always great to see my parents.  I wish we lived nearby so we could just see each other regularly instead of having to cram all our together time into short, intense periods.  They are both looking well, but there is no doubt they are ageing.  I got some nice videos of my Dad reminiscing about spending time with his grandparents as a child in the west of Ireland.  They were subsistence farmers, and they lived in a house with no electricity.  He remembers flickering oil lamps and his Grandma baking bread over an  open fire.  My Dad nearly died after drinking milk from one of the cows they had and getting gastroenteritis.  This was during WWII, and there were not a lot of medicines available.  Probably what you could buy over the counter in a drugstore these days would have changed it from a life-threatening illness to a merely serious or inconvenient one.  I always think of this story, however, when I hear about people wanting to drink raw milk, or worse, give it to their children.  There is a good reason milk is pasteurized!

We read Isla her Tails book for the first time in a while, maybe even a few weeks or a month.  Anyway, it has these little tabs you can pull to make the tails move, and last time I read it to her, she didn’t know how or wasn’t interested in pulling the tabs, and yesterday she did so immediately.  It’s funny how she doesn’t seem to change much from day to day, but clearly she’s making little steps daily both mentally and physically.  I love this!  It’s just so much fun to see her learning.  Every day it seems she’s smarter and can participate in more interesting games.  B’s sister got her these beautiful Haba wooden blocks for her birthday, and I can’t wait to play with them.  I mean, see her play with them.  Ahem.  I don’t think I ever had blocks and I’m dealing with a long-suppressed block playing urge.