Sick

I'm so sick of dealing with sick. My own mild cold symptoms have endured for what seems like weeks. I had a brief visit with actual sickness - sore throat, coughing that kept me up at night - but now it just feels like my ears are plugged a lot of the time, mildly annoying is about all.

Kids, on the other hand...Lola's had a cold the last week or so as well.  Nightly filling of humidifers I can handle, but the pinnacle of sick was a few nights ago (between holidays and general daze of sick, inauguration, busy life, etc. I can't keep track of when anything actually occurred) when Lola was coughing her head off, up and down throughout the 2am-5am period, finally coming to bed with us at 5-something.  She seems to be getting better, in that slow, long-tail kind of way where you get close the gap between sick and well by half each day but never actually get there.

Sid joined the movement tonight, sort of.  He's had a little runny nose for a few days, nothing major.  A bit of a cough set in, but still pretty mild, thankfully.  He also has a molar coming in, so he's been a bit cranky.  The real treat was after putting him to bed, he cried a bit longer than normal so we "rescued" him like we do, giving him a few more minutes of awake time before putting him back in his crib.  Only this time, Morgan gave him a squirt of Tylenol to help him sleep with teething pain, followed by a sip of water.  Apparently the Tylenol/water combo triggered his gag reflex and, well, let's just say we found out exactly how much mac and cheese he ate and that he doesn't chew his food.  Cleanup on aisle 12.  

Please, let us get well and stay that way for a while...I can't decide whether sleepless nights or cleaning up "pew-hawk" (Lola's expression for Sid's eruptus) is less desirable in the annals of parental duties.

Back to it

Sheesh, over two weeks since last I wrote here. Between holidays and the usual busy-ness of life with two kids and running a business, blogging has taken a back seat, clearly.

We had a nice Christmas, snow and all, and a visit from Aunt Patty to round things out. Lola has hardly had any time on her trampoline that Santa brought, between cold, snow, and punishment for some pretty bad naughty times we've seen in recent weeks, she hasn't had more than a dozen bounces on it, poor thing.  We're all enjoying the Wii Fit we got, and myself, I've used my Skeletool and new headlamp multiple times, but hardly touched the two books I got that I'm very excited about.  I was truly rewarded with some great stuff.

Weather-wise, irony abounds - our friend in Portland barely made it out of there they had so much snow last month, and today, 2nd week of January, it was almost 60 degrees here. I saw a guy in shorts and short-sleeve shirt outside today! (Oh, and reports from southern France, normally balmy on the Mediterranean coast, are of COLD nasty weather there too!) Weird winter, to say the least.

At EcoReno, business was pretty good leading up to the holidays, but has certainly slowed now.  That's not unexpected in retail, particularly in the economic climate we find ourselves in.  We're starting our monthly EcoChats, little environmental lectures/seminars, this Saturday, expanding our product selection all the time, building lots of great word of mouth and buzz in the community, and getting publicity more and more.  We got a mention on the radio and a TV spot - if you check the EcoReno blog (and if you don't, you really should, we do post stuff there that's worth seeing, and if you like us enough to read this site, you should definitely read that one too), you've already seen this, but it's worth including here too.  May I present, a small portion of my 15 minutes of fame:

[flv:http://goecoreno.com/EcoRenoKRNV.flv 480 368]

And lastly, I'm happy to say I've updated photos in Lola's album, Sid's album, and added photos from Lola's (sort of broken second-hand) new digital camera she got for Christmas.

We're nine days away from a new President.  Happy 2009 to all.