I think it's one of those things that kind of crept up on us until early this morning, G woke up with the dreaded croupy-like cough (as opposed to full croup). It's like those coughs that you get as an adult that wake you up in the middle of the night because you get on a coughing fit, and pretty soon your ribs and abdomen are hurting because you've been at it for so long – but these are characterized by the barking-seal sound that they make. As I remember we had a bout of this last year about this same time, give or take a few dark months. We had gone to the late night walk-in clinic and the doc there had told us that it was only croup-like because, among other things, you could "treat" it temporarily with cold air or hot humidity. It seems only when those home treatments didn't work (and a couple other symptoms that I can't remember now manifested), it was time to go to the ER and get some steroid injection. Scary, huh? Thankfully, we never got as far as that and she managed to get some rest on the nights that we had the humidifier going.
So this year's episode is sort of shaping up like last year's: the cold air didn't do much this morning but the humidifier seems to be helping tonight. The tricky thing about the croup-like cough is that you don't really hear much of it during the day, although there is some wheezing. The real action happens at night...
p.s. As I write this, Drew is trying to straighten our crooked live Christmas tree. And BB's getting into all the Christmas decorations. We've got the Christmas tunes going. Now I think I'll bust into those baked goods that we bought at a fundraiser this morning.
p.p.s. I was getting BB ready for bed when I caught a whiff of her pine-tree breath – she was taste testing some of the needles. She's quite the dynamic girl: I pegged her for a beer-and-pizza kind of girl – G's wine-and-dinner-parties – but it seems she could just as easily be martini-and-h'ors-doeurves too.
