Update on Maren

Thank you all so very much for your well wishes for Maren and your sympathy for me. :) Some of you have wondered how she got salmonella. Well, remember that little trip I took to visit my grandparents a couple of weekends ago? That was the weekend all of this started to go down, although no one knew it was happening at the time. My grandparents called several days after we returned home when the news broke, to see if we were sick. We seemed to be fine--or so I thought. Maren started to show symptoms on Saturday, although I never have gotten sick and I drank considerably more water that weekend than she did. It hasn't been confirmed by the lab yet that what she has is salmonella, but the timing is just right and the symptoms all match, and if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck (and in our case, poops like a duck), well you know how it goes. If it's something else (like rotavirus) then the timing is just a very strange coincidence.

She was still bad today (so that would make seven straight days of diarrhea every 30 minutes, if you can imagine) and this afternoon it looked like the sores on her bottom had actually opened up, so I called the doctor and we have an appointment for early tomorrow morning. However, since that call at 5:00 p.m. things have gotten more ~ahem~ solid, and the skin on her bottom actually looks slightly better too. I still want to keep the appointment, but it gives me hope that maybe things are actually looking up. I'm not sure any of us can take this for much longer. I'm SO ready to hang up my Poopsmith gloves and shovel.

Maren's apparent improvement comes not a moment too soon, as her birthday party is scheduled for 11:00 a.m. tomorrow morning! She chose a Curious George theme (actually, Maren refers to him as "George Curious") and we only invited four other little girls, so it shouldn't be too wild. We're going to feed them lunch and do a few little George Curious activities, then have cupcakes and let the Birthday Girl open presents and the kids can all play. Should be fun and relatively stress-free. And with that, I'm off to put together the party favors!