Whew, what a month!

It was the Wednesday before Mother's Day when Miss A had the accident that led to one of her teeth having to be pulled, which I wrote about in my last post. The poor thing hasn't been able to catch much of a break since then, although I'm hoping that now (please don't let this jinx it) we'll have a quiet period for a while.

She went back to day care that following Monday. That Wednesday night, a week after her accident, she developed a fever. We wound up in the ER with her on Friday night because her fever spiked and she was still screaming and crying an hour after it came back down with the help of medicine. She was finally able to go back to day care on Tuesday.

After three days of normalcy, that Friday (the start of Memorial Day weekend) she came home from day care with a stomach bug that was going around.

The stomach bug led to another problem we've not had to deal with before: constipation.

We kept pushing water, which she drinks pretty happily. We tried the Pedia-lax liquid suppositories, 2 nights in a row. They made her cramp up and scream for an hour, but nothing else. We tried to offer her "soda" - prune juice mixed with water so that it had bubbles in it and looked like R's Coke. We offered apple juice, too.

Did I mention that we apparently have the only child in the world who does not like juice or soda?

Finally, on our third trip back to the pediatrician in a week, he suggested we give her Miralax. That took 2 days, but it finally worked. It was around this time that I also came down with bronchitis and a sinus infection and had to spend as much time as possible in bed for about a week, because I was too weak to sit up for more than 30 minutes or so at a time.

So the week of Memorial Day, she was home all week until that Friday. When R went to pick her up that Friday afternoon, the lead teacher alerted him that she thought Miss A might have a urinary tract infection based on complaining about pain as soon as her diaper got wet and suddenly refusing to sit on the potty. (She had loved to do that up until this point.)

Back to the pediatrician we went.

Do you know how difficult it is to get a urine sample out of a barely-2-year-old? Seriously, I think it is the most frustrating thing I have experienced in my brief 2 years as a parent. After 6 days of dealing with that, I was in tears, too.

She would not sit on the potty. She would not sit with her naked bottom on my bare, cross-legged lap (the specimen cup tucked underneath her). Bribing with cupcakes did not help. Having her take off her diaper and stand there in the bathroom, in hopes she would just eventually go and we could shove the cup against her legs and catch anything we possibly could did not pan out.

Zip, zilch, nada - it's amazing how much bladder control a toddler can have when it's the exact opposite of what you want them to have.

Back to the pediatrician we went. We were going to have to resort to having him get a sample via a catheter, which was an experience I was hoping to spare her. It did not go well. He was not able to get a sample.

After another 4 days of her complaining and crying any time her diaper was the slightest bit wet, we wound up going the route of a plastic specimen bag that adheres to the appropriate area via a semi-sticky piece of foam and catches the urine in the attached bag. The reason the pediatrician didn't take that approach to begin with is because it's not a sterile approach (I read online that up to 75% of samples can be contaminated), so kiddos oftentimes wind up having to be treated when it's really a false negative.

Yea - finally success! Or so I figured, because there was a blue line on her diaper. I thought since that was the case, she must have filled the bag with enough that it overflowed into the diaper.

Ha! Silly, optimistic me.

There were literally all of about 3 drops of pee in the bag itself. The diaper was definitely wet, and the bag was still adhered to where we put it, so clearly there was something we didn't do right. I didn't have much hope for the lab being able to get enough of a sample off of that, which was the point at which I wanted to just break down and cry. But we went ahead and took it in anyway.

Imagine my surprise when the doctor called a few days later to say they tested it and she didn't have a UTI. So, yea for that!

Thankfully, she seems to be making progress. She's not complaining about wet diapers anymore and even asked to sit on the potty twice tonight, and stayed there (her naked little bottom on the seat, rather than in a diaper and sitting on the lid) for 2-3 minutes each time.

She's weaning off the Miralax, and so far her BMs are still normal. But the stomach bug really did a number on her GI system, because she's still consistently passing a fair amount of loud, stinky gas, which she never did regularly before this. Hopefully that will continue to improve with time, too.

And we're seeing progress on her mouth - last week, she finally started to drink out of a straw again, and this weekend, she began experimenting again with using her remaining front tooth to tear a piece off a slice of bread. Next week, she'll have an impression taken in order to get a fake tooth made. We don't want her to have to live with the gap for the next 5 years.

Here's hoping the next several weeks will be more calm than these last several have been!