He’s 6-weeks old, but setting up this appt taught/reminded me of something else: Non-emergency appts have to be set-up way ahead to get the dr.(s) I want. Seems there are other people as well who find them preferable.

Our “Arg!” moment came at the end of the appointment. Elisha’s still been struggling with the thrush (never totally gone) for weeks, and I’ve been striving to reach the four (count-em, four) doses a day with his yeast med. Today I asked about the “purple-stuff” I was told about by two different people.

The first time it came up, I filed it away as a pseudo home-remedy (like vinegar that fixes everything in some form) then someone else mentioned it while I was in the middle of the 4xs/day regimen and it sounded downright attractive. I asked the Ped about it when she offered to prescribe another med that would take two weeks to run.

She said yes it did work, but I had to be prepared for everything to be purple, because it was a dye. Everything. And they had some in the office, and it usually only took one application. Maybe two if it wasn’t quite taken care of. I think I was too near shock to be actually angry, but I did feel misused. Elisha and I have been dragging through weeks and dozens of med doses when 2 or 3 days of purple mouth and skin could eliminate the problem?

I don’t know about many other moms, but for me there’s no contest. He’s asleep now, purple-faced after nursing (I’ll put up the pix at helmericks.net the next time we update the photo gallery). I have a dark shirt on (so I don’t need to be concerned about him drooling on my shoulder), and there’s a generic pre-fold dipe under his face in bed. Big sacrifice.

I’ll correct myself later if this proves to be wrong, but three days of being dye-conscious seems like a small price to pay in order to preclude a total of five-weeks (!) on an anti-fungal regimen.

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And it also seems that he’s simply a more highly-strung baby than his sisters were. I suspected this a bit when I heard him cry right after he was born– neither of the girls did. It was the first thought that crossed my mind: I wonder if this means he’s going to be more intensive than the girls…

Of course, neither of them liked to be left alone either– they were both easy enough to soothe, but they weren’t going to (for example) lay alone in their crib until they fell asleep. And if they were awake they wanted to be held. By that limited description all three are the same.

I sometimes felt weird staying up late (Melody was up til 1 or 2 a.m. most of her first Christmas break, as I recall) or holding them all the time, but they weren’t hugely difficult to do, and they were so content, then. It seemed more weird to let them just cry when we knew how to soothe them.

Elisha is very similar, there are ways to soothe him (so by definition– as I understand it– it’s not colic), they just require more conscious effort and awareness. And he sleeps a reasonable amount so I still get to do my own thing for a while and unwind a bit. It works out; it’s just not as mindless as (I thought) a third kid should be.