Ok! I better get a post up here before the ladies rally together and show up at my door with pitchforks!

It has been a dreary few weeks. After a long stretch of single-digit temperatures and snowy weather, we are now in a long stretch of “Unhealthy” air quality warnings. A thick blanket of fog, smog, and frogs has settled into the great bowl of Utah, and it looks and feels pretty ugly. The warnings specifically state that children shouldn’t be outside if they don’t have to be. So between the gross weather and air, the flu epidemic, and the fact that some of us are still not feeling 100%, Emrick and I have left the house exactly three times in the past 16 days. This is very unusual for us. We normally run at least one errand every single day, even in the winter, just to get out of the house. But when I look outside at the frozen tundra that is our backyard, it is not even a little tempting to go outside for a frivolous trip. We go to the grocery store these days, and that’s it. And at the grocery store, I sanitize the crap out of the shopping cart (literally probably), I cover Emrick’s face when a coughing child passes us in the aisle, and when we get back in the car, I sanitize our hands. When we get home, we wash them. While we haven’t been suffering from cabin fever thus far, I am already looking forward to summer. But that’s how I always am. Cold temperatures and/or snow at Christmastime? Awesome. But as of January 1, I’ve had enough. From there on out, I am counting days (and snowflakes) until Spring (which, in Utah, arrives the first week of June).

Anyway, I guess the dreariness has zapped not only my motivation to leave the house, but also to post. I will try to be better. Tonight I will post pictures from our Christmas trip to California. I did not take nearly as many as I had thought because Emrick was truly miserably sick for half of the trip. But here is what I did get.

I had visions of Emrick running downstairs on Christmas morning and diving into the presents. But he was still feeling pretty sick at that point, so here is Marcus holding him and trying to get him to look at all the goodies under the tree.

A rocking moose, a shopping cart, and a shark on a tricycle?!?! Emrick was too sick to notice or care. Poor kid. 🙁  By the way, I tied that ribbon around the shark thinking it would be oh-so-cute, but seeing it flung over the trike like that, I think the shark kinda looks like he’s being strangled.

Anyway, after almost all of the presents were opened, Emrick perked up a little bit.

He did a little bit of his own gift-opening…

… and he nearly busts a grin while hanging out with Uncle Chris.

By Christmas evening, Emrick was feeling MUCH better, taking notice of his presents for the first time really. Here’s Marcus helping him get acquainted with the trike.

Santa brought Emrick a multipack of Play-doh and as it turns out, the kid is quite the sculptor!

Don’t believe me? Here’s Emrick in the very act of sculpting that rose!!! 😉

He makes candles, too!

Anyway, Emrick was feeling pretty well Christmas night, and he continued to feel well for the next several days He was pretty much 90% of his old self.

Emrick started feeling badly again on the way home on the 30th, though. He was running a mild fever on both days of our trip, the 30th and 31st. And even on January 1st, our first full day home, he was feverish. Unlike the beginning of his sickness (the 21st to the 25th), his mood was not adversely affected this time. He was as happy as ever. But still, I thought it strange that his fever would go away for several days and then come back. So on January 2nd, I called the doctor and got him in for an afternoon appointment. It turned out he had an ear infection. I explained to the doctor the up and down of the previous 12 days, and he seemed to think that the ear infection was new — that it was secondary to whatever cold-like thing he had initially. Anyway, so he put Emrick on a 10-day amoxicillin regimen, which showed results after just one day. The fever was gone after the first night (of course, we finished the entire prescription, which actually lasted for 11.5 days).

The medicine was a pink, strawberry flavored fluid, and according to the accompanying literature, it was okay to mix it with milk, juice, food, whatever. We tried once mixing it with milk, but that was a no-go. So I established a routine where his morning dose was administered with a medicinal dosing spoon (which produced tears but was over in seconds), and his evening dose was administered via ice cream. I bought some single-serving cups of low grade vanilla ice cream, and every night, I mixed his medicine with it, producing a strawberry flavored soft serve. Emrick LOVED it. I thought he might get wise to the fact that his “ice cream” tasted oddly similar to the medicine he was forced to take every morning, but I don’t think he did really. I guess when you’re two and all of a sudden getting ice cream every night when you’ve only ever had it on maybe five previous occasions in your entire life, YOU DON’T ASK QUESTIONS. IT’S ICE CREAM. DON’T OVER-ANALYZE IT.

Right?

And then I worried that he would complain that the ice cream routine ended as abruptly as it began. Nope. No ice cream for Emrick in exactly two weeks, and he hasn’t even mentioned it. Deep down, he must have known it could never last.