breathing and unbroken

Oh hey look, another week flew by. 

Well, parts of it flew. Some parts were a bit draggy. Millie started wheezing again, right about the time when her sinus infection should have been clearing up. Time tends to drag when your baby is struggling to breathe. For the fiftieth (or so) time this winter/spring.

Luckily (??) this time was the straw that broke the camel's back and we left the doctor's office with an asthma diagnosis (not really serious- "mild intermittent asthma," triggered by respiratory illness) and a prescription for a nebulizer! I am so relieved, to be honest. I hate feeling helpless every time her otherwise-inconsequential colds/allergies/viruses morph into constant wheezing and struggling to breathe, leading to too many after-hours chats with the doctor and prescriptions for steroids. Now we can do breathing treatments at the first sign of respiratory junk and hopefully keep her from getting to that point again.

So we spent all our spare time learning how to do breathing treatments!! True to character, Millie was pretty chill about the whole thing.

Don't bother me, Mom. I'm reading books and looking like Darth Vader!

A nebulizer selfie? Isn't this kind of pathetic, Mom?

 The doctor and pharmacists all said that most babies fight the treatments, but she really isn't too fazed by the whole thing. Sometimes she naps, sometimes she imitates the noise that the machine makes, and sometimes she just keeps on doing her thing- jumping, as the case may be.

Don't be jealous of my awesome Saturday morning fashion.

And as hoped, her breathing and coughing immediately improved once we started treatments. Now she's just a normal snotty baby- yay! And she can focus on the truly important things in life: learning to pull up on stuff.

And pretending she's about to crawl. Even though she's not.

She's also working on penning her first novel. Probably the Next Great American Novel, actually.

...and yet all they give me to write on is this little pad of sticky notes. How they underestimate me.

As for me, I've spent every spare moment of the week trying to read Unbroken for book club tonight. I finished at 4:00 this afternoon, so give me a gold star or something. (Actually, if you're going to give me a gold star, it should be for the goat cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped dates that I made to take tonight. If I make it there and there are actually any left...that will be star-worthy.) I'll admit that this isn't the type of book I would ever have chosen to read on my own (it's a biography, for one. NOT FICTION. As in...not really my thing), but I'm glad that I did read it. It was long and really hard to read at times (for different reasons- sometimes because they were going on and on about the minutiae of the various planes used by the Air Force during the 1940s (surprisingly, another thing I'm not really passionate about!), sometimes because the subject matter (being a POW in Japanese work camps) was incredibly disturbing and horrifying)...but I feel like I learned a lot and it was an amazing story in the end. It also made me feel like the stupidest person ever for anything I have ever complained about. Like even my deepest pain and most awful situations seem laughable, basically. Poor little spoiled American brat...waaah, waaah. Anyway, I think that our discussion tonight will be a good one. I'm also hoping that I'll find that I'm not the only one who knew so incredibly little about the role of Japan in World War II. That was my other takeaway from the book. I'm a spoiled brat, and incredibly ignorant about WWII. Well, at least one of those things I can remedy with some more reading and my old friend Wikipedia...

The dates Book club is calling my name- time to go! Have a great rest of the weekend!