The Shoes Which Were Not (And other thoughts on penicillin)

On Thursday evening, I put the kids to bed and was looking at a remarkably wide open Friday. I have Fridays off; and we had no playdates scheduled, no errands which desperately needed running, no groceries we couldn't live without. I only had one goal: to buy a pair of shoes to wear with a dress I had borrowed for the annual Alstom Holiday Party on Saturday.

But instead my day went like this. On Friday morning I woke up to this:

This, folks, is a classic "Amoxicillin Rash." You may remember that Elliott was put on antibiotics one week earlier for an ear infection. After rushing my pok-a-dot baby to the pediatrician that morning, Elliott was declared "allergic to Amoxicillin and presumably all penicillin based antibiotics." To be re-evaluated when he is old enough to take an allergy test, probably in 5 years.

To add insult to injury, on the way to the doctor's office that morning, Elliott managed to have a huge blow-out diaper which leaked poop all over his car seat. This was extra fun when Nory reached over to play with Elliott's buckles as I was pulling him out of the car and got her hands covered in poop. So with two kids covered in poop and one also covered in pok-a-dots, we managed to get into the doctor's office, get cleaned up, see a doctor, and leave. It was not my best doctor's visit ever (but probably not my worst, either).

After arriving home, drugging Elliott, and putting him down for a nap; feeding Nory and putting her down for a nap, I decided to set up the long-overdue baby gate that had just arrived in the mail. I usually leave this type of thing to Dan but hey, I'm enlightened, I can install a simple little baby gate! I was almost done with it when Elliott woke up from his nap. I set him down to play while I finished up. Except for having to dig a few 1/4 inch screws out of his mouth once, I was doing pretty well. But while I was carrying the trash to the trash can, one of those bags of Silicon DO NOT EAT KEEP OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN beads exploded. Have you ever seen them? Each bead is the size of a poppy seed and clear. Thousands of invisible, toxic beads bounced across my kitchen floor, spreading out across the whole house, while my 10-month-old-must-put-everything-in-mouth baby stared in delight. After vacuuming and sweeping I was still finding them everywhere. Great. I'm sure toxic silicon beads go perfectly with a penicillin allergy.

At this point I called for reinforcements, grabbed the kids (Nory was up by then) and we played upstairs for the next hour waiting for Dan to come home early.

We are now treating Elliott with Benadryl, which seems to help a lot with the itching, and the rash is starting to go down (we immediately stopped the antibiotics too). Dan instigated a "one M&M per bead" policy with Nory so she spent several hours tracking down every last silicon bead in the house. I even had time to make dinner and get dressed before our friends showed up for dinner that night.

However, I did not buy shoes on Friday. And I did not earn a mom-of-the-year award. But we were all alive at the end of the day, and sometimes that's as much as you can hope for.