Helllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooooo.

It’s been a bit, hasn’t it? Amusingly I had BIG PLANS for blogging a bunch while I was on “maternity leave” from my regular freelance work. I had fond memories of the two big kids sleeping a lot as infants, and I figured I could spend some of that time updating this blog.

Ha. Ha.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

So, that didn’t happen. Obviously. For one, the big kids continue to have the same number of activities as they ever did before Lochlan was born. For another, there was a surprising number of required steps to get our little dude’s birth recognized. For still another, this guy pretty much demands constant motion when awake (and thinks mechanical substitute that is the cool-as-hell swing we bought him is bullshit).* Anyway, I’m not sure why my genius self thought that I’d be somehow less busy with all that than I was before he was born. But as you can imagine, I was SORELY MISTAKEN.

But anyway, the boy is asleep, I’m caught up on work e-mails and I’ve got a couple minutes (update: he woke up. ha. I am now continuing this days later) so I thought I’d take some time to share what we’ve been up to lately.

*Update: I started this post about two week ago. Then continued it a few days later. And am now finishing it. The good news? He’s gotten over this constant motion nonsense and is much more chill lately. He also hates his swing less than he used to.

Hospital visits 

So, prior to Lochie’s arrival we’d had exactly one emergency room visit in 6.5 years of parenting. And that was because Fiona stuck a Lego up her nose.

In the last month, we’ve been three times and had our first two hospital admissions (non-birth category).

Luckily, it hasn’t been quite as terrifying as it probably sounds. Since we are on the base, if our kiddo gets sick anytime that isn’t between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, the emergency room is where we have to go. Lochlan acquired what seemed at first like a little cold when he was about 7 weeks old, but on a Saturday morning his cough started to sound a little worse and I was afraid he was working too hard to breathe. The diagnosis at that particular ER visit was pretty much “worried parents,” but the doctor gave us a couple things to look out for and told us to bring him back if he started doing any of them. About 12 hours later, he started breathing faster than the doctor told us was OK and spiked a low-grade fever, so it was back to the ER we went. My mother-in-law Gail was visiting at the time so she was able to stay with the big kids while Chris and I went to the ER, which was fortunate because it was one of the roughest nights we ever had, primarily because of the number of times they had to stick him with needles. Ultimately his breathing improved with one Albuterol treatment and a chest x-ray didn’t show anything too worrisome, but since he was so young at the time they had to do a bunch of blood work to be safe, which required a 48 hour hospital stay while they waited for cultures to come back.

We ended up spending more than two days at the hospital (in the room next door to where he was born!), but fortunately Lochlan seemed to improve completely within only a few hours of receiving an antibiotic shot in the emergency room. We aren’t sure entirely what was wrong, but given how he responded to the antibiotic our doctor figured that it was probably a virus causing the respiratory symptoms plus some other random infection. RSV and UTIs apparently go hand-in-hand for whatever reason, so they think that’s a possibility.

We were released from the hospital with just-in-case antibiotics, and over the course of the next week-and-a-half he improved dramatically. We had his two-month well child visit on a Thursday, and he looked totally fine.

So, naturally, on Friday he started doing the increased-work-of-breathing thing again. In the evening, because he obviously knew his favorite ER doctor was working that day and I guess he wanted to visit? We ended up doing a couple breathing treatments there, then were admitted so they could monitor him all day to be safe. Fortunately for us all, no fever = no blood work this time, so it was dramatically less traumatic for him than the previous visit. (For context, at his first stay they concluded that he couldn’t possibly be too sick purely because of the intensity with which he fought them off during his final blood draw). We were also happy to see several of our favorite nurses upstairs as well, including the one who almost had to catch Lochlan when he tried to rush into the world, another who snuggled him when he was two days old and, weirdest of all, one who turned out to have gone to the same high school as me. Small world, eh?

We aren’t entirely sure what his deal was the second time — same virus? different virus? some kind of reaction to something? — but the important thing is that he seems to be on the road to recovery again. He still has a bit of a cough that he’s trying to shake, but he’s been in much better spirits lately and you can just tell by looking at him that he feels better. We’re crossing everything that we are done with the hospital now!

*Weeks later update: he’s all better!

Baseball games

So while clearly our weekend evenings have been dedicated to visiting our friends at the base hospital, most of our week nights have been dedicated to baseball — two nights a week for Owen, one night a week for Fiona — plus games on Saturday mornings. Its been adorable, but somewhat trying because of these insane swarms of gnats that have been plaguing the area. “Gnats” don’t sound too bad, but these things are insane — swarms flying directly for your nose, ears, eyes and mouth.  I don’t remember these at all from previous years, I guess because they weren’t common higher up the mountain.

Both of the kids enjoyed their baseball season though!

*Update: the season is now over! Now on to swimming. 

Lochie’s adoring public

We’ve had visitors! My parents came out to visit at the end of April/early May, followed by my mother-in-law, Gail! We had a great time with both, though unlike previous visits we mostly hung out close to home so that we could attend ALL THE BASEBALL practices and games. Unfortunately Gail also got the short end of the stick because she was here for Lochie’s first hospitalization, but that ended up being super helpful for us at least. We did get to hit a few places though — Taormina with Gail, Enna with my parents.

Trip planning for 2019

So, things have been hectic but never too hectic for a bit of trip planning! This has been our longest stretch without leaving the island since we arrived here in October 2016, and we are getting a little antsy.

We decided to cancel the trip we’d planned as our first family-of-five vacation (a trip to the other side of the island) after Lochie’s first hospitalization, which turned out to be good since his second hospitalization was on the day we were scheduled to leave. So now our upcoming schedule looks like this:

Trip to the U.S.: We’ll be spending a few weeks this summer with our families back home, and couldn’t be more excited! We are perhaps less excited about the plane ride with Mr. L, but I’m hopeful that since he’ll be not-quite-4-months old, he might sleep some stretches. This may be wishful thinking.

Barcelona and Mallorca: This is an exciting trip because we’ll be joined by Chris’ brother, Brett, and my sister, Torie! It was a bit of a spur of a moment thing because flights to Barcelona from Chicago were unbelievably cheap (we’re talking in the $300 range). After they’d booked those, we spent weeks trying to decide where else we wanted to go from Barcelona. We ultimately decided we wanted a bit of a resort-type feel, so we ended up selecting this hotel on the island of Mallorca.

Vienna: A super cheap fare discovered six days after Lochie was born means we are headed to Vienna for a long weekend this fall! We’ll probably also plan a day trip to Bratislava, Slovakia, in the mix.

Garmisch and Salzburg: We’ve been hearing rave reviews about the Edelweiss resort in southern Germany ever since we arrived in Sicily, so this winter we are planning on giving it a try.

Final thoughts

-Owen is done with school for the year! I can’t believe that kindergarten is already over. Owen has learned and grown so much this year and I can’t wait to see what he gets up to next. Fiona has school through the end of June, sadly these will be her last few weeks in her Italian preschool. We’ll miss them so much!

-It’s been a hard few weeks because we’ve had to say goodbye to some of our closest friends lately, as they’ve returned to the United States. It’s rough on us all, but kind of the nature of living here. We’re looking forward to visiting our friends in the States some day though!

-Owen and Fiona remain AMAZING older siblings. I was worried that they might be jealous or act out after the new baby arrived, but it’s been completely the opposite. They are absolutely obsessed with him. They constantly beg to hold him and especially love showing him off to their friends!

So, that’s about it for now! As you can tell, this took me about 100 years to finish so I don’t know when I’ll be back (especially as I’ve started working again and suddenly our kids have the busiest social schedule in the world). But I’ll keep in touch as best I can!

In the meantime, here are a few more cute kid pictures.