Fever

Last night, Ada woke up around 2AM - screaming. I hurried to her crib and tried to find her pacifier thinking she just had a bad dream and needed soothing. As soon as I got near her I knew something was wrong. She was burning up. I have never felt her that hot. I snatched her up out of the crib and started searching in the dark drawers for our ear and rectal thermometers. She stopped crying right away, but as I held her in my arms she kept twitching. First I thought she was getting startled by something but once I had her in my room and had turned on a dim light and the twitching continued my heart started racing. I took her temp with the ear thermometer and it read 101.7. That was my cue to take her more accurate temperature rectally and with Stephen's help we stripped our twitching daughter down and tried to comfort her while the numbers on the digital thermometer rose to 103.2. Despite the panicked feeling in my heart I kept calm and we decided to call the pediatrician to see if we should be headed for the ER. I have never been more thankful for our pediatricians office (Oberlin Road Pediatrics) than I was last night. The answering service picked up right away and said they would have a nurse call us back in a moment. I sat nursing a twitching Ada in the dark while we waited for my phone to ring. Within minutes the call came and on the other end was a sweet male nurse from Wake Med who listened to my details and then calmly informed me that the twitching did not sound like a seizure and that her fever would have to be much higher to cause that. He said that twitching with a fever of this magnitude is pretty normal in little guys like this and advised me to treat the fever with Motrin and watch her to make sure it goes down. Apparently there is a bug going around that causes nothing more than a really high fever. He assured my southern heart that I had not woken anyone up and asked me to please call back if anything changed or I had any other questions. He said they worried about parents who didn't call in situations like this rather than those who did. He said taking her to the ER in this state would have been the worst thing to do, exposing her to loads of germs in her weakened state could have made her sicker. I thanked him profusely and dosed her with Motrin and rocked/nursed her back to sleep and made a futile attempt to get back to sleep myself.

Now for the "funny" part. When she woke up fussy again around 6:00, I fed her as much as she would eat and then Stephen took her downstairs to play and try to distract her a bit. Margot started whining so I got her up and fed her and that is when I realized... it wasn't Margot.. it was Ada! Margot was the sick baby and we had been consoling her as Ada all night. I had wondered why she was not acting like herself and assumed it was just the fever. Sigh. Our sweet babysitters put them in the wrong cribs last night and in our panic (and the dim light of the bathroom) we didn't even think to double check who whose temperature we were taking and just assumed it was Ada since she was in the crib on the left - aka - Ada's crib. The perils of raising two very identical looking little girls. 

Margot is still not feeling very well this morning, though her fever is down and the Motrin seems to be doing it's job. She is enjoying being cuddled and carried around all day.

Now on the lighter side - here are the girls and their buddy Ben earlier this week. The three of them had their overalls on and Erin and I couldn't resist recording the moment.