Hayley and Kate Minter

I was playing “Super Mario 64″ on the Wii Virtual Console last week, and Hayley was in the living room with me. I got to a level with a lot of lava, and if Mario falls in the lava, he shoots up in the air with smoke coming off of his butt.

As Hayley was watching this, whenever it would happen, she would laugh harder than I think I’ve ever heard her laugh before - just loud belly laughs and exclamations of “YOU BURNT YOUR BUTT!!!!” She spent probably a good 20 minutes laughing and laughing, and of course I kept falling in the lava to keep her going.

Also on the subject of humor, Hayley has been telling us that things “crack her up.” Only she doesn’t say that, instead she says “That really creeps me up.” We both get a kick out of her “creeping up.”

Hayley’s preschool closed to students yesterday and this coming Thursday for parent/teacher conferences. I signed up for one of the early slots yesterday morning, and went by on my way to work.

Since Hayley’s only been in the school about a month and a half, I didn’t expect there to be too much “progress” to report. I met with her teachers, Ms. Meena and Ms. Gretel, and they said “We can’t say anything negative about Hayley - she’s a wonderful student!”

They said that she’s always finding ways to keep herself busy - they never have to tell her “Hayley, go find some work to do.” They said that she’s very eager to learn new things, but also will work on repetition to practice her skills. They also reported that her interpersonal skills were excellent, as she plays well with both boys and girls, and even took a new 3-year-old student “under her wing” and made sure the new kid was happy and had a friend at the school.

She apparently knows all of the continents, and will be moving on to North American geography. She understands her numbers 1-10, and is working on the teens. She is working on sandpaper letters, which is a precursor to writing.

There were no negative comments about her, the teachers said that they were glad that she was enrolled in the school, and that Hayley was doing extremely well in the Montessori program.

It was a great progress report, and seems to match the reality we see with Hayley’s learning and eagerness to go to school. So for a first progress report in a new school, we couldn’t ask for anything better from our big girl!

We had a rough day with Hayley this week. She’d been suffering from a bit of a cold for a week, and woke up Tuesday morning feeling alright, although with kind of a froggy voice. Holly took her to the doctor, who said “Yeah, she’s probably getting over the croup or something viral. She’ll be fine.” She was feeling pretty good all day Tuesday, so she and I went to the Hurricanes game that night together.

She was fine at the game, but a little tired. She actually climbed in my lap during the 3rd period and fell asleep with a couple minutes left in the game. I had to wake her up to get her through the parking lot and into the car, and she fell asleep on the way home.

When we got home, I took her out of the car. She was crying a little bit, and wheezing some, but I took that to be the end of her croup coupled with being overtired and awakened. We got her into bed, and she fell asleep after a little more crying about “hurting” in an unspecified way, but she was still wheezing, so we put the baby monitor in with her.

We listened in on the monitor, and her breathing wasn’t getting any better as she slept. It sounded worse, in fact. After around an hour (11pm or so), we got her out of bed. She was nearly gasping at this point, and as I held her I could feel her stomach muscles clench every time she inhaled. It was at this point we decided that I should take her to the ER. Fortunately, just a week or so before, I’d found out that there was a WakeMed emergency room just a few miles from us in North Raleigh, so I I put her in the car and raced off there.

She was still gasping when we pulled up to the ER, so I rushed her into the desk. Now, every other time I’ve been in the ER (which isn’t many), it’s been “Ok, you’re not bleeding out of your eyeballs, fill out this form, take a number, and we’ll call you in 4-5 hours.” In this case, they took one look at Hayley and said “She’s coming back **now**.” Whoosh, we were back in one of the ER rooms. Almost immediately, 6-7 people were in the room. They got an oxygen mask with some sort of medicine in it onto her face, they ran an IV, they started putting some stuff in the IV.

That was the first time in an admittedly short four years of parenting that I’d felt The Fear. From talking to other parents, they know what The Fear is. It’s the chill that goes across your soul when you are standing in the corner of the ER, watching a bunch of doctors work on your little girl, while one of them says “It’s good you brought her in when you did, and didn’t wait any longer.” It’s a sensation unlike anything I’ve ever felt before, and if I never experience it again, it’ll be too soon.

They got her breathing stabilized (not before she threw up a mixture of cotton candy, Dippin’ Dots, and french fries into her breathing mask), and she eventually fell asleep in the bed as I watched her heart rate slowly drop from the 170s down to the 110s. At around 3:30am, she was awake and more alert, so they loaded her in an ambulance and took her to the main WakeMed campus (this North Raleigh ER being only a freestanding emergency room and not physically attached to a hospital). We got to the Children’s ER, where they evaluated her again, and said they wanted to keep her around for monitoring. She managed to get some sleep, and I got a few minutes as well, before Holly’s parents came to town. That allowed Holly to come by and relieve me.

Holly, her parents, Kate, and my Dad all went to the hospital while I slept. The doctors had originally told us she wouldn’t go home before Wednesday night at the earliest, probably Thursday morning, but I got a call as I was ready to head back to the hospital that the doctors had released her. She made it home around 4pm Wednesday and had a good night’s sleep that night. We’ve kept her out of school the remainder of this week, but she seems to be suffering no ill effects.

The doctors never told us exactly what was wrong - the most common thing we heard was that it was some sort of croup or other respiratory virus that, all of a sudden Tuesday night, started inflaming and closing off her windpipe. I don’t know why it just suddenly hit her like that, but it appears to be a one-and-done deal where now that she’s over it, she shouldn’t have any lingering effects.

We’re glad our little girl is alright.

I’m going to swear that I got a laugh from Kate tonight while I was playing Pat-A-Cake with her. That’s the one thing that seems to elicit the biggest grins from her, and tonight we got a laugh too. Yay, sweet baby laugh!