Voice of the Undiagnosed Hive

Anyone else remember Voice of the Beehive, or am I the only one? LOL

Anyway, poor little Greyson woke up Wednesday morning with a nasty case of hives. One eye was kind of swollen. His hands and feet were red and puffy. Hives all over - well, all over except for his trunk which is usually where they start, right? Just plain weird. And, of course, we are between insurances right now. Could not have been worse timing. So I did what any other Mom of the Future does and went to WebMD. It confirmed what my almost six years of mothering (which included several "hive" appointments at the ped) was telling me. Unless there is an indication of anaphylactic shock, there's really nothing you can do but give Benadryl and wait it out. Of course, I had already done that.

The big kids were dying to get out and run around and we had planned to take cupcakes to the park, so we decided to go ahead and go. Probably not the best decision, in retrospect, but it was just a weird rash and he seemed to feel just fine. Oh the looks we got! And then the other moms in our group start in about how it looks like chicken pox. Or poison oak. Or scabies. Suddenly, we had the plague. *sigh* After about an hour and a half, the sun started irritating the rash and it flared up a bit. They practically had me convinced that he needed to be taken to the ER at that point. So I rounded everyone up and piled them in the car and prepped them for a long wait at the local clinic for the uninsured.

Luckily I had the sense to call DH and he talked me out of my mommy-panic. After about 5 minutes of being in the house, Greyson's hives subsided again. I then indulged in a couple conversations with some friends who had been through this recently with infants and found out that I hadn't actually been giving Greyson enough Benadryl. Phew! So a full dose and an oatmeal bath made him once again look like a feisty toddler instead of a pathetically sunburned albino leopard.

Thursday morning he was spotty again, but the Benadryl took it away almost instantly. He's been acting just fine too aside from a bit of a runny nose. I'm chalking it up to a weird virus. But guess how I woke up Thursday morning? I awoke to Cameron crawling into my bed, coughing, and saying, "Mommy, I'm too sick to go to gymnastics and t-ball today." That's a sick boy who cancels a 6pm t-ball game at 7am! He's usually the one who is always saying Let's wait and see how I feel. We have another game on Saturday. There are only 10 games in the season and, of course, this is the only week that we have three games in one week. I hope we don't have to miss too many of them.

Anyway, we spent the day laying around and watching Star Wars. All of them. Well, we did skip Episodes I and II, but he watched III, IV, V, and most of VI (he fell asleep near the end). He also did some big, complicated dot-to-dots this morning and said we should call them school today. LOL. He's actually been asking to do school the past couple days but he always seems to ask when it's a really bad time to break out the books. Like when we're leaving in five minutes. Or when I start to make dinner. But we've been watching some specials that I TiVo'ed from the Science Channel on space. That counts. Cassia has been doing a wipe-off math book. They played some computer games yesterday too that were reasonably educational.

I think I have decided though that I'm going to officially call it a "new year" on June 1st and crack down a bit. Maybe we can try some books on tape again and listen on the way to the beach. I know someone with a copy of Story of the World on cd, maybe I can borrow that. I've been meaning to burn some classical cds too with a mix of the real versions and all of our fun lyric versions. I don't want to get into anything too stressful, but getting back to a routine would be nice. I'm really missing my routine lately.

So that's the news from the sick house. Aw, poor guy. Cam had asked me a few minutes ago if he could play video games even though he hadn't done any schoolwork and I said yes. He just decided to go lay down instead. I hate when the kids are sick. :(