Most every weekend my dad goes ice skating. His friend Bert usually joins him. I try to join a couple of times a year. Josie watched us do it once a few weeks ago and had a good time. Yesterday we asked if she’d like to try to do it herself, we showed her videos on youtube of other kids skating, talked about how she’d wear a helmet and she was enthusiastic.

We got to the rink, got skates for her (too big unfortunately), and got all the way dressed just in time for the bell to signal time to stop skating for an ice cleaning break. So we waited while that happened, Josie had a snack. In that time they thankfully found the one pair of size 6/7 skates that they have and gave them to us so she had the right size skate on. They let people back onto the ice and off we went. Josie was dragging us in front of people trying to get to the ice!

We brought her out to the middle of the ice and the expected happened, she tried to stand, she fell over. We held her, she struggled to stay on her blades at all. She lay on the ice and we spun her around, she really liked that. She got to go around a few times with grandpa being held. She spent a bunch of time in the team boxes playing with the door to the ice. We skated a bit more in the middle, she still didn’t get much of the hang of it. She said it was time to go, and so we went.

I think she had a pretty good time all things considered. She got closer and closer to being able to stand on her skates on the ice and she definitely learned how to walk on them on the rubber floor by the end of the day quite confidently. I don’t think we’ll try again soon but definitely next year I expect we’ll do it again! After skating we retreated to Panera for some much deserved hot chocolate, soup and sandwiches.

Both Mio and George these days spend a lot of time in the tower until Josie chases them off with a ‘no Mio, no George’. She’s big into scolding the cats, unfortunately she makes up some infractions that aren’t really a problem.

I guess Jordi and I are generally members of the clean plate club because tonight at dinner Josie expressed shock and told us we were ‘not done eating’. Here’s our plates. She was of course done eating.

At this age, the milestones have definitely slowed down or are not as obvious a change as from non-mobile to walking. Today though Josie showed some real progress on her journey to using the potty. She spent the entire day from wakeup to bedtime in underwear. She had one small accident while literally getting out the unfamiliar potty at a friend’s house but otherwise was dry all day, including nap. This including a trip out of the house to playgroup and to a friend’s house! Yah for Josie! We barely even need to remind her anymore, in fact I think she gets ticked that we do ask her.

And I’m getting some milestone’s too, my photos are getting a bit better I think, here’s one from class.

For all those parents of little ones in the cold climate out there reading, I suggest you might take a look over at landsend.com‘s outlet these days as they have a number of coats and snowsuits on sale for the 2T/3T set at considerably cheaper than next year’s prices (at least half price, usually more). Selection is of course more limited, but I found stuff that I like for Josie. I usually get lots of free shipping and coupons from them in email too, so if you don’t, I’m happy to pass them along. I also just ordered a hat and mitten for Josie from llbean for next year and beyond, but I don’t see such good jacket deals there (free shipping codes there too).

Today started early, around 3am when we finally turned on the light to see what was making Josie wake up every half hour. We knew she was sick and congested and she’s gotten better at sleeping through it lately, but not last night. Taking a good look at her, it’s clear she’s breathing pretty hard and fast. Insert major parental guilt for telling her to just go back to sleep earlier. We take her temperature, run the hot shower to steam her up and see how she does. She isn’t really getting better and she keeps trying to sleep but ends up waking herself up with a whine frequently. We decide to take her to the ER. We call her docs to get their opinion. To our surprise, they tell us to put her actually in a bath (during which Josie insisted we wash her hair at 4am), and put her back to bed. She didn’t have a fever but she was breathing about 57 times a minute. We managed to get her back to sleep. The nurse suggested we might want to make an appointment in the morning.

Might? this was one unworried nurse. So we went to bed and got up in the morning at normal time, except Josie would cry if she wasn’t nursing or being held. Somehow our doctors, despite opening at 8:30, never get their phone off the answering service until more like 8:40 after I’ve already called 10 times. We get in touch, and the receptionist questions if we should even come in at all or just go right to the ER. We assure her the night nurse said no need to go to the ER. A short 25 minutes later we’re in the doc’s office (and another 30 minutes after that waiting for the doc) and she’s diagnosed bronchiolitis. A virus infection with rough breathing. She had good oxygen levels, but we do the albuterol treatment. It helped, Josie declared herself ‘bedder’ and she played with the toys in the room. The doc came back and listened again, but she still heard a lot of crackling in Josie’s lungs and decided that Josie needed more treatment and observation and sent us to the ER.

So we ended up there anyway, wish we would have gone at night actually, but it was ok. I took Josie to Children’s and they took us in right away and Josie did well waiting for docs and such (Jordi had some customer work to do and joined us later). They did one more treatment and decided she was good enough to go home, although we didn’t notice things get particularly better from the second treatment. Josie declared herself ‘healthy’, and baby and cat were also healthy too after getting their own ‘treatment’.

One thing they had a lot of trouble with was us declining taking home the nebulizer. Our insurance, let’s just say, has a very high deductible and so we would have paid for the entire machine to the tune of $200. We already had one at home from Jordi’s asthma days but they still were confused as to why we didn’t want the new shiney one. We finally left with a prescription for a new neb in case Jordi’s didn’t work. Which it does, just fine. Hopefully Josie won’t need many home treatments at all, we’re hoping for no more now.

4 hours after arrival at the ER, home we go. We got us all some food and I headed off to CVS to get the albuturol in case we needed it. Our CVS has apparently become exceedingly popular or people are getting really sick these days or else they’ve fired too many pharmacists because the backup was INSANE. I pleaded ‘toddler with breathing trouble’ and got to skip some of the wait.

At first. Because it seems you need a prescription for saline. Yes water, a prescription for water to mix with the medicine. The doc did not give us one, so I called our pediatrician and they hustled one to CVS for us. Another round of waiting for that prescription to be filled, I tried to use some cool coupons I had for new prescriptions, $25 gift card per prescription. Figured now is as good a time as any, except the woman working the cash register is new and screws up the order she scanned the coupons in and they are ‘declined’. Argh. That’s $50 in coupons, I’m not just going to walk away. They page the manager 5 times. She doesn’t come. I go to the front of the store and ask who the manager is. One woman finally admits she is the supervisor and says she’ll come back ‘when she’s free’. Another 10 minutes later she finally does show up to help me and someone else and fixes the problem. Total time in CVS for two prescriptions that literally require smacking a label on a box of packaged things: 1 hr 45 minutes.

I think CVS has started a corporate policy of making people wait extra long for prescriptions so that they’ll shop while waiting. I hate them.

All in all, Josie is doing ok. Hopefully we’ll have a better night, but I could sure use the sleep because I’ve got the same cold, it luckily just isn’t bronchiolitis in adults!