Lennie’s sick, M’s sick, I’m sick. Lennie’s gotten the worst of it, with what appears to be a urinary tract infection. It all started a few weeks ago, when I gave her my cold (I also gave it to my sister and her family and I think to my dad). She developed an ear infection toward the end of getting over that cold, and she was on antibiotics for that. The antibiotics gave her diarrhea (on top of a yeast rash that makes her butt look angry and scarred even still, in spite of some medecine we’ve gotten for it), which we’re hoping is what has given her the urinary tract infection. (We’re hoping that’s what it is because one of the alternatives is that the valves in her ureters are screwed up and she’s got reflux that basically lets waste get back up to her kidneys and infect the whole tract; the treatments for this can be as mild as a daily antibiotic and as severe as surgery to repair the valves. So we’re hoping it’s the diarrhea and are going in next week for testing.) For the third day in a row now, we’re going in to the doctor this morning to have them administer a very painful antibiotic to Lennie. Very painful as in our baby, whom we coddle so thoroughly that the first peep of a cry is reduced to a whimper within minutes if not seconds, has bawled open-mouthed and at the top of her lungs for 15 minutes each time. And on top of it, we keep pumping Motrin into her for the fever (which got up to 104.something) and bulb suctioning her nose and generally allowing her to poked and prodded at. This really stinks.

In other, more pleasant, news, she’s got a second tooth coming in (we were at Target when M discovered it; we were browsing separate sections of the store, and she started cooing and talking to Lennie about the tooth and apparently kind of freaked out a little girl nearby who thought she was being addressed). It’s a bottom near-front one. And she’s sitting up well enough now that we’re not constantly worried that she’s going to go tumbling backward (though last night, as she and Ella were sitting facing one another on the floor sort of petting at one another’s hands, Ella reached up casually and put her hand gingerly on Lennie’s forehead to push her over backward; we got it on video, and I’m a little ashamed to say that I can be heard saying “thunk” in time with the impact of Lennie’s head bumping the floor).