Mr. & Mrs. Smith: Mono

The last 3 weeks have been, to say the least, interesting. Granted new baby=crazy anyway. However, Ryder has been a piece of cake. It's been our other two that we've been struggling with for much different reasons. If you remember, Memorial weekend we had the Westerns up. By the time they left, Addilyn was a hot mess. We assumed it was the lack of sleep with a cinch of a cold. It only got worse... We had dropped them off at 5am on Tuesday while we went to the hospital to have Ryder. When Scott brought them to the hospital you could see that Addilyn was dropping off significantly. We tried taking pictures all together but it was pathetic. We decided that it was best if Scott just took them back to our house instead of our friends because she was not doing so hot (and she was super hot). It was definitely a stressor being in the hospital and not being able to help Addi and trying to figure out with Scott what to do with her. He ended up taking her to the Dr that next day.

She had all the symptoms of strep, but at the apt her quick test came back negative. The Dr was positive something was going on so they took some blood to get tested. It was the first night I was home (I think?) when Scott and Addilyn got in the car to go to the Children's hospital ER. Her airway was very little and she could breath through her nose. She wasn't eating a thing and her fever was super high. We can't exactly give her Motrin without food or something in her stomach. Anyway, I checked my phone and had a voicemail from her Dr saying the blood results came back positive for mono. I called Scott (who was driving to the ER) and told him to just come back home that it was mono. We bought essential oils and all kinds of treats (ice cream, made popsicles, oreos, jello etc) anything that she might eat. Since mono is viral, there's no medicine to take. So the oils and diffuser we bought were to help if they could at all (which we think they did).

While Scott was home he took care of Addilyn mostly- making sure she would eat something and keeping on top of her Motrin intake. Her fever was easy to spot when it started to come back because she would get super irritable. Poor Levi during this time was getting left out. I couldn't pick him up after having a baby and Scott was preoccupied with Addi. So he went through some tantrums and acting out because of the lack of attention.

When Scott went back to work, I had friends from church take Levi in the mornings for a few days so that both Addilyn and I could sleep in the morning. That was so helpful. One morning she woke up and was covered in a rash. I stuck her in the bath and called a nurse's hotline. They suggested putting baking soda in her bath. So she did and soaked for quite some time. I put the laptop in there and she watched Netflix. You can see in the pics below our set up with Levi playing with play dough. It's been 3 weeks now and Addilyn seems to be significantly better. The only thing we are dealing with is the lack of hearing. She's practically deaf and I have to yell at her all the time to talk to her. We'll be taking her in again soon to get those ears checked. Below are some pics highlighting Addi and her appearances. She started out super swollen and got better in time.