Look very carefully...

and see the teeny tiny brown patch of grass that appeared sometime yesterday...if the wind stays down today we might possibly hit 40!

wow, thats.....really freakin cold.

I can understand Erin how you might think thats really cold, but for us up here, 40 is great this time of year. People stop walking around with their jackets on at 40 (obviously not for extremely long periods of time) but when we hit 40 after long cold winters of sub zero temperatures 40 feels awful warm to us....the weather station says it's only 20 out right now, but it doesn't feel it, I think it's slightly higher than that... No you won't catch me out there right now without a jacket, but at 40 I'll be walking outside, taking the dog out, checking the mail in just a shirt ..

When it is 40 here people are wearing parka's and every piece of warm clothes they own.

I was dying the other night, the news did a piece on the locals on the beach in Flordia who went down for the SU game. They were in bikinis and swimming saying it was 82.... then they panned over to the Florida natives sitting on the beach in their sweatshirts saying how cold it was. 82 and I am wishing for the snow back, lol.

tara wrote:I was dying the other night, the news did a piece on the locals on the beach in Flordia who went down for the SU game. They were in bikinis and swimming saying it was 82.... then they panned over to the Florida natives sitting on the beach in their sweatshirts saying how cold it was. 82 and I am wishing for the snow back, lol.

Too funny! My oldest dd lives in Miami. We were down there for Christmas a few years ago. The weather man was predicting a huge cold front. He actually started the story with - get out your boots and parkas. How low was this cold front? Gasp, mid to upper 50's

my boyfriends mother lives in flordia and all winter long she was gripping about freezing to death. she called me up a couple of months ago and it was like 9 degrees here with a wind chill of -20 or something crazy like that, saying she was wearing 5 layers of clothes, wrapped up in a blanket and still shivering. i asked her what the temp was down there and she said 38.... i hung up on her.

hmm 74 here. Just about right.

We are at 54 today but it's really windy. I just returned from teh quickest ER trip ever 34 minutes from start to finish and it was pretty packed (he screamed and I do mean screamed from the second the triage nurse but the band on him until we walked back out the door- I have no doubt they rushed us to get rid of him, I am okay with that, lol) with Rylan who has an ear infection so we are stuck inside.

I'm not sure why I feel compelled to add this but...

I swear I am not one of those moms who run to the er with every cough. The boy didn't sleep a wonk last night but was fine this morning. Then he napped and woke up screaming and had nasty stuff oozing out of ear like a runny nose (Saige never had an ear infection and the only one I am aware he had had no symptoms, they just noticed it on a routine visit) I did call his dr who said they would see him tomorrow afternoon, and his ENT who is on vacation so I had no choice.

I am SO not looking forward to this bill. But I bet if we don't meet his 1500 deductible we will be damn close. The down side is that HSA from Robs employer will pay out on it and the rest of us are pretty much screwed, they only give us 1500 for the year. That is 4500 more for the rest of us and apparently I can't elect what I want them to pay or not pay... I would rather pay it OOP because this hospital is by far the most reasonable with payment plans. It will be somewhere else when it's something outrageous that they demand payment in full in 60 days.

Sounds like Otitis media, with effusion, BTDT bunches of times. Don't put anything in there, the infection has come thru the tube( or the eardrum as the case may be) and relieved it's own pressure.
This is the point of tubes, to relieve the pressure, and protect his hearing

Tara, Quinn got a cold a few weeks ago where he had snot (just like the snot coming out your nose when you have a cold) coming out his eyes! It was nasty. But it comes from having good wide sinus passages. It runs in Scott's family. He (Scott) can hold his breath and make bubbles come in his eyes. He did it as a kid to scare his sister, LOL. I'd say it's a good thing that stuff is coming out his ears. Much better out than in.

Now it's bloody.... double yuck. I about loaded him up and back to the ER and called the nursing hotline instead (how embarrassing is it that I was an LPN years ago before I let it expire? In my defense I only dealt with old people, like really old people and bloody ears was almost always BAD) They said it was okay and a good sign after the thick nasty stuff. Also told me to get him to lay on a heating pad to help draw it out. Yeah. Right. No one makes Rylan do anything. I did manage to hold a warm washcloth on it for about 10 minutes but there was no way he was putting his head down on it.
Honesty until he started screaming I had no intention of doing anything but wait it out. I hate that they give you antibiotics for everything and I prefer to let nature take it's course as long as it isn't painful as much as possible. If it's viral the antibiotics do no good anyway. But with his hearing anything involving his ears sends me into a panic and I am afraid of permanent damage.

I know. I'm also the wait and see type. But last week I took Quinn in for an upset stomache since Caly had the same symptoms and she needed a school excuse. When they checked his ears they said he had an infection. We decided not to treat because he already had diarrhea. She said bring him back in a week. We brought him back and he still had the infection so she used a machine to see if there was fluid in the ears. She's great and said that if it wasn't bothering him, he didn't have a fevor or seem sick, then she didn't want to treat unless there was fluid since that can interfere with hearing. There was fluid in one ear so she put him on antibiotics and wants to see him in a month to make sure he doesn't need allergy meds or ear tubes. She said the long wait is because it takes a long time even after the infection is gone for the swelling and redness to go away and she didn't want to mistake lingering symptoms from a single infection for a chronic condition. I just love her to death for not trying to push medications on us. So many doctors I've seen would have signed him up for ear surgery at the first visit OR done the opposite and looked down on me for wasting their time. I like having someone who waits to see what is going on, but during the wait is still paying attention and monitoring the problem.

I do give his doc credit on the tubes... I wanted to go straight to the ENT but she insisted on the hearing evaluation first since he didn't have chronic infections. BUT that was also the visit that they determined he had one and since there were no symptoms I was thinking it probably wasn't the first, we just didn't know. Rylan is so hard because he is so difficult all the time, him being cranky is pretty much the way it is, not something that would clue us in on a problem.
I am starting to regret not doing the speech eval, he has a few new words but not many and they are starting to sound the same again. I'm going to beg for another hearing eval when I take him for the follow up. I suppose I will ask for another speech appointment too since the waiting list for that is months, the hearing one is only a couple weeks and that will come first, I can always hold off on the second if we need it.
He has had bouts of clear as day speech, like the day he looked at me and said I Funny, but they are very far and few. I suppose it's entirely possible he is just a stubborn boy and doesn't want to talk and if so, that's okay but if he can't hear well, that is something that can be and needs to be fixed, and well I want to know so we can do what we need to do. His doc seems to think that the tubes were the answer but I don't see how they can know that without another hearing test.

I so wish we could go to see a nice NP but there are just none around. As it is the peds office is 40 minutes away. There are ones closer but they wont take us back. We left when our family doc had another doc join his practice and he was awesome and wanted to see kids... then he left. The kids loved him, we loved him and switched to him, I really thought this one was there to stay, there have been several over the years and none seem to last, the GP running the practice is in his 80's and can be quite difficult- plus most of the patients are also in there 80's and refuse to see anyone but him, not leaving much for the other guy. When I wanted to go back to the Ped office they got really snotty and rude, so we went to the next closest, another "group"

I must be a horrible mother for wanting a GP that sees all of us, including extended family, and knows our names and history, instead of a group with thousands of patients and docs that barely speak English. I think that has something to do with the first group not liking me... I specifically asked at one point to either not see a certain doctor or to have a nurse there to relate what he was saying. He was a nice guy but his accent was so thick that I couldn't really understand him well and I had an infant... I NEEDED to be able to comprehend what I was being told and they gave me a really hard time over it, I swear I was polite and tried really hard to explain why in a nice PC way.

We are so lucky that way, Tara. Our NP is the neice of one of Scott's Dad's best friends. She's lived in this town all her life, her kids are in the same school as ours, and she's like family. Plus, even though she's a pediatric NP, she'll see me or Scott any time we ask. I'm very happy with her. And I know there are doctors in the office and I've had her step out to consult with them so I feel OK knowing that she's not a full MD.

But we went years where they kept switching doctors in our practice. I hated not knowing who we were going to be seeing.

I totally envy you for that.