Earaches and coughing and crying, oh my!

We made our tri-weekly trip to the pediatrician's office today. (That would be once every three weeks, right?)

And Talia has an ear infection. And Benjamin's lungs are inflamed.

I think I just need to cut this post and save it to the clipboard so I can just paste and post it once every three weeks.

We are looking at getting tubes put in Talia's ears. This is her 7th or 8th ear infection since October. Poor sweet baby. We should have known two nights ago when she was up from 11pm to 2am that she was getting an infection, but it took until last night when her fever reached 103.2 for me to realize what was going on. While looking in her left ear, after examining her right ear, the doctor told me, "The right ear is very infected and the left ear will be infected by this afternoon."

Meanwhile, Benjamin, who has been on an extremely regimented treatment schedule for asthma control, has spent the last 4 or 5 days with a barky, croupy-sounding cough. (This is what nebulizer treatments 2x's a day and his bedtime dose of Singulair are supposed to be preventing.) After several days of albuterol treatments with no change in his cough I decided something else was going on. Sure enough, some kind of virus has caused his lungs to become inflamed and so he is on our favorite Prednisone once again.

On the up-side: I am SO thankful for our wonderful insurance that covers all these repeated trips to the doctor and all the resulting medications. This is one of the many ways God has helped us financially in this economically thin season of life. And I am thankful that there are good treatments available for the multiplicity of ailments the kids deal with on a regular basis. I hate to see my kids suffer.

Now that the kids are medicated, we hope that translates to uninterrupted sleep. (We can always hope, can't we?)