Dear Chapters, let me buy some goddamn books, kthxbai

Tags

bad customer service, books, buying online, chapters, coles, gift cards, indigo

Let’s backtrack a few days.

It is the morning after my birthday. I have received 90 dollars in Chapters/Indigo/Coles gift cards between now and Christmas but I have not spent them yet because I know from experience that it is a mistake to buy myself ANYTHING between Christmas and my birthday. Whatever book I buy will invariably be the book that Perfect Husband bought for me as a surprise.

Perfect Husband wakes me up with “Happy Birthday! None of your gifts have arrived yet!”

I don’t mind that, but it means that I still can’t buy myself any books either. So Perfect Husband tells me which books he has ordered for me, so that I won’t go and buy them myself. It’s a good thing he did because otherwise I would have ordered those exact ones. So now I dance off to browse online for the other books I want.

Giddy as a kid in a candy store, I line up an impressive booklist online. Then, reflecting, I check the availability of some of my books in local book stores and then remove those from the online order. After all, the book store is an endangered species and I try to patronize them whenever possible. So I just order the books that you never see anywhere – a book on Baby Led Weaning, a book by the author of The Scientist In The Crib, a book about babies by Desmond Morris, and a book about secure attachments.

I try to order the books.

Chapters.ca tells me that I should log in so they can give me my irewards discount. Agreeing wholeheartedly, I attempt to do so, but my usual passwords aren’t working. Surprised that I have never created an online account at Chapters.ca before, I try to start a new account.

The email address you have given is already associated with an existing membership. If you have become a member using this email address, please call 1-800 blah blah blah to recieve your activation.

So… in other words I can’t create a new account OR log in to an existing account because I am an irewards member? I dial the number.

Thank you for calling Chapters Indigo online services. We are open Mon-Fri blah blah blah.

It’s Saturday.

So now I can’t buy the books because I can’t create an account or log into an existing one, because I paid them money to become an irewards member. I can’t get customer service for this issue, because it is the weekend.

So I wait.

In the meantime, I decide to go to the local store so I can buy The No-Cry Sleep Solution. They have two copies in store, according to Chapters.ca.

After half an hour of browsing the Parenting section, I come to the conclusion that there are no copies of The No-Cry Sleep Solution. Since the books appear to have been alphabetized by a blind chimpanzee, I wonder if I could somehow be missing the elusive books. The shopgirl that I hunt down assures me that they do have two copies in store. Her computer says so.

She can’t find The No-Cry Sleep Solution either.

“Sorry,” she says, “sometimes people, like, leave them on other shelves in the store?”

Perfect Husband leaves the aisle with an armful of Jenny McCarthy books, (of which there are plenty) because he has decided that they should be moved to other shelves in the store.

We leave Chapters without The No-Cry Sleep Solution.

Now it’s Monday!

I call Chapters  and ask them if I can please be allowed to create an account so that I can patronize their website.

They send me my activation email. I go to check-out my books and I enter my gift card number and the corresponding PIN.

Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.

Hmm. I try again.

Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.

I try again.

Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.

I do it again, this time with the little spaces! They still won’t recognize my gift card.

I notice that my order total has inexplicably dropped, but not enough to be explained by the gift card actually going through.

I go back to my cart. One of the books has mysteriously disappeared.

“What the fuck?? Where did my book go??!” My frustration has reached the point of multiple punctuation marks, which is the classic edge of insanity.

I find the damn book on the site again and re-add it to my cart. I try to enter the gift card number and pin.

Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.

Perfect Husband reads each number aloud while I double check.

Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHH! GIVE ME MY BOOKS, DAMN YOU! WHY CAN’T I BUY BOOKS FROM YOU??”

“Shhh. Leave it for now,” advises PH. “We’ll go to a different store tomorrow and ask them about the gift card.”

I’ll go to the other store tomorrow (the internet assures me that that location also has two copies of The No-Cry Sleep Solution, at least one of which I hope will be coporeal in nature) and ask if I can order the books directly into the store.

In the meantime I’m going to be pouting and moping around the house going

“…but I wa-ant my boo-ooks!”

Update: Chapters got in touch with me and helped me fix my problem.

Let’s Call It a Mile-Pebble.

Tags

4 month old, babies, exersaucer, family, infant development, leaning forward, milestones

Around the time that Babby turned 4 months old, I hauled the exersaucer that a friend gave us out of the storage space. I was desperate for new Babby entertainment. I took some of the gewgaws off, so Babby wouldn’t get bored of the toys all at once, and plunked him in. He loved it. He would spin and spin and spin the spinny toy while squealing with glee.

Then he would stand up in his excitement, and… topple backwards.

Once he had leaned back, he had no idea how to reach the toy, and he would make a few futile arm-stretches before bursting into frustrated tears.

For the first little while, I would have to repeatedly come back to the seat and prop him back up against the front of the saucer, so he could reach his toys.

Then, one day a couple of weeks ago, a lightbulb went on inside his head.

There are some milestones so trivial that no baby book logs them, and no internet resource advises you about it. They are so trivial that you don’t even think of them as milestones, unless you are a first-time mother watching her baby figure it out for the first time.

These milestones are so trivial that you can’t very well call your friends and start bragging about it, because they’ll think you’re totally batty and spend too much time alone (both are probably true).

There are only two people in the world who will share my excitement about something this ridiculous, I thought. So I picked up my cell and sent Perfect Husband a text message. Then I picked up the land line and called my mother.

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“Guess what? BABBY JUST FIGURED OUT HOW TO LEAN FORWARD!”

Ironic Book is Ironic

Tags

book titles, books, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, irony, positive psychology

Be positive YOU MORON

Grown Up

Tags

birthdays, vacations, Whistler

My last days of being 28

I’m TWENTY NINE YEARS OLD today.

I am married. I have a baby. I have a Beloved Dog and an Inexplicably Loved Cat. I have a house.

I just found out that one of my posts is going to be syndicated on BlogHer.

I don’t have a job.

All in all, I think I’m doing pretty well, eh? Better than last year.

Perfect Husband is getting baseboards installed, but he couldn’t resist giving me a “real” present, so on Wednesday I got whisked to Whistler, where we stayed at a dog friendly hotel with a fireplace  and a soaker tub (PH knows his audience) and then went on a baby-friendly sleigh ride featuring hot chocolate at the half-way mark.

It was lovely.

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Whistler is fantastically dog-friendly. Makes me wish I lived there, instead of here. We walked our Beloved Dog around town, including into the Whistler branch of PH’s company (by which I mean the company he works for; he doesn’t own a company). We got a tour of the office and half the people there had dog cookies on their desk, so it was a great day for the dog, too. We visited some shops, too – also dog-friendly!

Babby was delightfully well behaved. He smiled happily at everyone while we explored and then dozed off on the sleigh ride. Perfect Husband and I are loving Four Month Old Babby. Much less screamy.

Except at night. He made up for his angelic behaviour all day by waking up every hour all night long. C’est la vie.

The hotel room had a basket full of goodies. While I was settling Babby down with some booba, Perfect Husband looked at the price list.

“My parents never let me eat stuff out of the minibars in hotels,” I told him, “they said the stuff was always ridiculously overpriced.”

“Same here. They were right! Sixteen dollars for 375 mL of wine! The water is $1.75! The Mars bars are $1.80 each!”

We looked at the chocolate bars.

“…Guess what?” said PH.

“What?”

“We’re grown ups now.”

The chocolate was delicious.

Deathly Hallows: Deathly Awful

Tags

bad adaptations, bad movies, books, films, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, movies

It’s the week leading up to my birthday and Perfect Husband has lined up a series of treats for me, the first of which was last night: a movie! We went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (part the first). I’ve been wanting to see it since it came out. People told me it was way better than Half Blood Prince.

I suppose they were right. Then again, a rusty half-penny nail up the nose would be better than watching Half Blood Prince.

It was still bloody awful.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time. I like going to the movies. The movie doesn’t have to be good in order for me to enjoy the experience. The movie was terrible just the same.

Let’s go through the good stuff first:

1. The opening scenes were good, setting the tone and following the book quite well.

2. There were only a couple of severe infractions against the plot.

3. They left in one of my favourite lines – the Weasley twins looking at each other after they’ve both had polyjuice potion and saying “wow, we’re identical!”T

4. The destruction of the horcrux was pretty decent.

5. The animated tale of the three brothers was excellent, if a little out of place.

Now, the worst of it:

1. Due to the fact that Half Blood Prince was such a cinematic abortion, there was a lot of “fixing” to be done, mostly involving the hasty introduction of several characters and key plot points which were left out of Half Blood Prince (“Oh, hi, I’m Bill, Ron’s brother. I got attacked by a werewolf and I’m marrying Fleur in the next scene. Did I mention that the Burrow looks fine, despite the fact that it was burned down in the last movie?” and “Hi, I’m Mundungus Fletcher. You’ve known me for years but movie directors kept editing me out because I didn’t seem important. But actually, the fact that I stole a bunch of your things from Sirius’s house is about to become extremely important to the plot.” )

2. They introduced sexual tension between Harry and Hermione, and made it look like poor Ron was going to be the third wheel forever. Ron gets no sexually tense moments with Hermione, presumably because Rupert Grint isn’t as good looking as Daniel Radcliffe and it violates Hollywood’s sensibilities that the funny-looking one might actually get the girl.

3. They entirely cut Kreacher’s back-story, including the details of how he knows anything about the locket, which would have made an action packed and heart wrenching flash-back. They also cut out his emotions. He creaks out his knowledge of the locket’s fate  in a dramatic yet detached voice. People who haven’t read the book must be very confused. He is not given Regulus’s locket as his own possession, and he is never even thanks for his help. In other words, the director, like Voldemort, doesn’t think that the experiences of House Elves are important.

4. Perhaps this is why Dobby is given the credit of finding Mundungus Fletcher, and why Dobby maintains an obsequious and neglected image as if he were still enslaved to his hated former masters. The fact that he should be a well-cared for and cheerful elf with several woollen hats on his head is dismissed. He is free and he will look miserable about it! I was always put off by the way they portrayed him anyway. He reminds me vaguely of Jar-Jar Binks, and that’s just wrong.

5.  They never explain that a Taboo has been placed on Voldemort’s name, so the mysterious ability of Death Eaters and Snatchers to find Harry in unlikely places must be purely due to Deus Ex Machina.

6. They never explain why Harry is carrying around a shard of glass and looking at it wistfully all the time.

7.  Instead of Worm Tail’s heavily-foreshadowed and deeply-symbolic death, he gets blasted from behind by Dobby and Harry just steps over his body.

8. They don’t talk about wand allegiances which is kind of a big deal.

9. We don’t see the indivisibility cloak even once. That’s right. The director cut one of the Hallows out of Deathly Hallows.

10. They cut the portrait of Phinneaus Nigellus, so how are they going to explain the doe appearing in the right place?

I know, I know, people always say “Oh, but the books are so long, you have to cut some stuff out.” This is true. I don’t want you to think I’m this terrible pedant who is impossible to please. There are movie adaptations of books that I like. The movie version of Watership Down is excellent, and that must have been every bit as hard to condense into an hour and a half as any Harry Potter book. The first Bridget Jones’s Diary movie is also acceptable (we won’t talk about the second one).  I don’t mind when screen writers and directors cut certain things and alter time lines a bit in order to distill the essence of the book into a two hour movie. I just have a problem with them cutting through the book slap-dash without any sense or reason.

Stuff that is cuttable:

• They could have cut a lot of the aimless wandering done by the trio as they try to avoid being caught and wonder what to do next.
• They did cut a lot of the details of Dumbledore’s life as revealed by Rita Skeeter. I don’t like that, but I admit that it isn’t vital.
• There is a lot of teenage angst that is really unnecessary.

What I don’t understand is why they took up time with this stuff:

• Multiple slow pans through dramatic landscapes while Harry/Hermione/Ron looks away from the camera melodramatically.
• Hermione cutting Harry’s hair.
• Harry and Hermione dancing together and hugging after Ron buggers off.
• A five minute scene where a snatcher stands around sniffing Hermione. This scene was invented to replace the highly instructive scene where the trio overhear Griphook, Dean, and Ted Tonks talking about what is going on in the wizarding world.

Then there are the directing decisions which simply made no sense:

1. The wizards in the Ministry of Magic are mostly wearing muggle clothes – suits, ties, skirts and pants. Because, you know, Voldemort’s regime,  entirely dedicated to persecuting muggles and mudbloods, would encourage the wearing of MUGGLE CLOTHES instead of wizarding robes. Sure. Makes total sense.

2. The new evil regime of the fallen ministry is paralleled visually to Nazi Germany. It got so obvious that PH leaned over to me and whispered “They went a little heavy-handed on the Gestapo imagery, didn’t they? Even the type face they use in their brochures is the same.” I nodded. It was a little lacking in subtlety, I agreed. Then two Nazis walked by. Seriously. Suddenly the Ministry of Magic is overrun by people in grey SS uniforms, from the red arm bands and the 1945 style military caps, down to the shiny boots.

Check it out for yourself: 0:49-0:51 on the trailer – “wizards” standing around looking like Rolf from The Sound of Music:

Subtle, Mr. Director. Subtle like a train wreck.

So, they are a wizarding regime dedicated to persecuting all things non-magical, and they just happen to devise a uniform that is identical to a muggle military uniform of 60 years ago, abandoning their own traditional robe dress. Oh, and abandoning their wands in favour of weapon belts containing something that looks suspiciously like a handgun.

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT.

Here’s an idea, Mr. Director – how about you let Voldemort’s evilness stand on his own merit, without needing to compare him to Hitler? If you had ever read J.K. Rowling, you’d know that Grindelwald was the wizarding world’s Hitler. Voldemort is new.

I will fully explain why Voldemort is evil enough without SS uniforms in another post.

tl;dr – I could write better screenplays than the clowns up in Hollywood, who have no appreciation for the subtleties of literature.

Babby Hates His Bath. What Did I Do?

Tags

babies, bathtime, swimming, water

So, before I was even pregnant I told you all that I wanted to start swimming with my baby as early as possible.

That’s still the case. I was waiting because our pool is heated, but still cool, and I wanted to make sure he could maintain his own body temperature first. My other option was to enrol him in a class at a public pool, which would probably have a specially heated baby pool. The youngest class offered around here, though, starts at four months of age.

So a couple of weeks ago I picked up a Swimmi bathing suit, but before I could enrol Babby in anything, he took a sudden dislike for his bath.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!

I test the water before I put him in it. We haven’t scalded him. He hasn’t had any scary experiences as far as I can tell,  but suddenly he hates the bath.

He used to love the bath. When he was just a newborn, we put him in his bathtub while he was shrieking his head off and he settled down within seconds, moving his arms and legs dreamily through the water.

Babby's first bath at home (complete with Modesty Duckies)

His Spa Baby tub, which a friend of us gave me, supposedly imitates the confined environment of the womb. I don’t know if it does, but it takes up less space than your standard bath and Babby certainly found it soothing. For months we’ve put him in his baby bath every two or three days and he has splashed about, played with his toes, and attempted to drink the bath water. We have even resorted to it as a “pause” button when he was having one of his rage fits, because as long as his body was submerged, he’d be calm.

Babby at two months old - still calming down as soon as he hit the water

Now, all of a sudden, he screams and his fists shake with rage and he refuses to sit down in it. When Babby is mad, he gets stiff as a board and stands straight up. Last night we bathed him standing upright with his feet in the water while he screamed like an air raid siren, so it was more of a sponge bath than anything else.

We tried the big tub, in case the little tub was just getting too small and cramped (although it’s supposed to be fine for 12 months and up). He wasn’t too bad if he could nurse in the water, but if I took him off the breast, the rage reappeared.

Why? Why??

I want him to love to swim. I want him to love his bath. I want to clean him without it turning into a traumatic episode of temper.

What do I do? Assvice will be welcomed gladly.

A Cute Interlude: Babby In His Jolly Jumper

Tags

4 month baby, babies, jolly jumper, videos

Feed Your Pet Vet Food, Or You Will Pay… Literally.

Tags

animal health, animal nutrition, bladder infections, cats, dogs, Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease, FLUTD, health, nutrition, pet health, pet nutrition, pets, uroliths, veterinarian, veterinary diets

After reading about poor KellyKel’s cat on the DoCo, I feel the need to make this post.

Please feed your pet veterinary diets.

Especially if you own a boy cat.

There is startlingly little regulation of pet foods, and some of the ingredients in pet store and grocery store pet foods are frankly harmful to your pet. Cats especially are at risk because their health is very delicately balanced on their diet. Cats eat a very high protein diet, and this is rough on the urinary tract system. If a cat lives to be 20, one day its kidneys will wear out and that will be that.

Cat’s bladders tend to develop crystals when the pH balance of a food is even slightly off. The crystals scratch the bladder wall and bacteria begin to grow. This is called Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease. Vets refer to it as FLUTD (“Flutey”). It can happen to dogs, too, although it is rarer. Still, I have seen it! The crystals end up getting stuck together in that mass of crystals and blood and bacteria and white blood cells and they end up making a little stone. Sometimes (particularly with neutered male cats because their urethras are narrow) that stone gets lodged in the urethra and blocks the passage of urine.

From that moment on your cat has maybe 24 hours to live. Unable to pass urine, the toxins back up in the animal’s system and begin to kill your pet. Your pet will die either from the poisons that they can’t get rid of, or their bladder will BURST inside them. It’s painful. It’s deadly. It’s COMMON.

This isn’t something that is fairly rare. It’s something that actually fairly likely. If you walked into your local vet clinic and said “do you have a blocked cat in the back?” chances are they would say “yes,” and if it’s a big clinic, chances are they will say “yes, which one are you looking for?”  You want to scare a vet clinic? Call them and say “my cat isn’t peeing”.

There are a million reasons why a cat will get crystals. Stress is a factor. Dehydration is another (it is more common in cats who are eating dry food and don’t like drinking water)… and diet is yet another.

Many diets are poorly pH balanced. Not just your cheap grocery store foods (although they are the worst offenders) but expensive pet store foods, too. Being pricey doesn’t make it good, or safe. I have seen several pets come in with crystals caused by food, and they were eating a (WET!) high-end pet store product, boasting all-natural ingredients.

Pet owners look for phrases like “all natural!” “grain free!” “No additives!” “with fibre!” “with real chicken!” and so on.

They never think to look for “with a balanced pH for your pet’s urinary tract health.”

But if you have a male neutered cat, that is exactly what you should look for, because when your cat blocks, you have a choice. A vet bill totalling nearly $1000 or more… or a dead cat. If you choose “dead cat” you still have to choose between your cat dying in extreme agony or paying for a euthanasia.

It’s a bad scene.

Why does it cost so much to unblock a cat?

First you have to sedate the cat, because sticking a catheter up a blocked urethra into a bladder that is as turgid as an over-filled balloon is hideously painful AND difficult.

Then you have to keep it sedated until waking it up is no longer a cruel thing to do.

Then you have to give it antibiotics for the infection, and blood tests to see how badly poisoned the cat is.

Then you have to keep that catheter in its urethra for several days, draining the bladder of its brown or red infected pee.

You also have to keep the cat on drugs to relax the bladder so it won’t go into excruciating spasms.

…and that’s if the case isn’t too bad.

You may have to operate to get a larger stone from inside. This is more common with dogs. Check it out (yes, this is from my OWN experience, these aren’t pics off of the web):

Yeah, that big white thing? That's a stone. IN A DOG. A female bearded collie if I remember right.

IT WAS IN A DOG'S BLADDER

Sometimes they can’t unblock it. Then they have to cut off the cat’s penis. This is not a choppy-chop operation, because you’ll screw up the urethra if you do that. It’s delicate surgery, and often one that vets don’t like to do – they’d rather call in a specialist or at least a vet who has experience with them. You basically do a sex change operation on the damn cat, so it pees like a girl. That’s REALLY frigging expensive. It’s a long operation, so there are sedation drugs and anesthetics and veterinary time (I’ve seen three vets all pending over one of these surgeries). There’s the long recovery, too.

It sucks.

So… you can feed your pet a diet from the pet store and hope for the best… or you can buy a veterinary diet because all veterinary lines are pH balanced to prevent such problems.

A veterinary diet for a healthy animal isn’t even that expensive. They have high quality ingredients (my favourite brand, Medi-Cal, is all naturally preserved, too) and research-driven formulas and they never change the recipe without warning you (which other brands do all the time).

Your pet will poop less on a veterinary diet because there aren’t any fillers (unless, of course, you buy a high fibre formula designed to make your pet poop more!) and you end up needing to feed a lot less because they are so highly concentrated. Veterinary diets often end up being CHEAPER than the cheap grocery store stuff, and that’s before the $1000 operation to save your cat.

Oh, and veterinary diets are 100% guaranteed.

Remember those pet food recalls? I know someone whose cats were eating the cheap stuff. One died, the other has permanent kidney damage. It took thousands of dollars to save it. The owner has never seen a dime from that company.

But the veterinary diets called our clinic and told us which formulas were tainted (and there weren’t many, because only a few specialty formulas had gluten in them at all). Then they told us to phone every client who bought those food in the last three months, and they would refund the money spent on food over that time frame. Then they paid to test each animal who ate those foods for signs of poisoning. Then they paid to fix the poisoned animals.

Next time you’re in your pet store, ask the clerk if your pet’s current brand of food guarantees their food that way.

Just in case.

Jane Eyre Versus Bella Swan – Let the Bash Begin!

Tags

books, characters, grammar, heroines, Jane Eyre, literary criticism, literature, Twilight

VS

Now, to anyone who has read Jane Eyre, this comparison may seem ridiculous… and it is.

But there is a need, mostly because Stephenie Meyer has put Jane Eyre in the same sentence as Twilight several times (trivia I could have lived without: originally she named Rosalie “Carol”). She said that she got Edward’s name from Mr. Rochester, and has listed Jane Eyre as one of her “inspirations” for Twilight.

“I read it when I was nine,” says Meyer, ”and I’ve reread it literally hundreds of times. I do think that there are elements of Edward in Edward Rochester and elements of Bella in Jane.”

You heard it right folks – literally hundreds of times. So, she must know Jane better than I do, because I’ve only read it a couple of times a year since I was 13 years old; sometimes I read it more often and sometimes less. That means I’ve probably only read it between 20 and 40 times, but Stephenie Meyer has read it literally hundreds of times. Yikes! She must read it at least seven or eight times a year to get that number.

There is a parallel between the creation of both characters:

1. It is said that Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre to prove that a heroine doesn’t need to be rich or beautiful to be interesting. Similarly, Meyer has said that Twilight was based on an idea about a “normal” teenage girl and a vampire.
2. They are both teenage (17 and 18, respectively) brunettes who are exceptionally pallid in complexion.
3. Both Bella and Jane have somewhat weak constitutions, with a tendency towards fainting episodes.
4. Both Bella and Jane closely resemble their creators. Bella looks like Stephenie Meyer and Jane looks like Charlotte Bronte.
5. Both of them get to experience the fantastical love of a Byronic hero which their authors never had in real life. I feel fairly safe in saying that Meyer probably never actually got to be worshipped by a vampire and I also know that Bronte’s real-life Rochester, Constantin Heger, probably never loved her back and definitely never married her.

When I list it like that, it seems like they’re practically sisters, doesn’t it?

Nevertheless, Jane could kick Bella’s ass from here to eternity using the sheer force of her awesomeness.

[Beware of spoilers]

Tsk

Tags

babies, four months old, teething

We think Babby might be teething.

It’s so hard to tell what makes a tiny baby cry. But he wakes up out of a sound sleep with a painful cry, again and again and again throughout the night. Sometimes he’s just screaming in his sleep and if I count to ten he subsides back into a worried slumber. But most of the time he just starts to wail. We’ve tried Tylenol, to little effect.

The reason we think it is teething is because

"Hmmph!"

• He chews on his hands a lot and drools.
• He keeps pursing his lips like a disapproving-librarian.
• He makes little clicking noises which make him sound like a disapproving librarian.
• There are clearly two white bumps under the skin on his upper gums, and bumps on his lower jaw on the right. They don’t seem to be coming through – they’re just visible.

He is also tugging at his ear, but I think that’s a sign of referred pain. I don’t think he has an ear infection, because the ear tugging was happening in Nova Scotia, too, before he caught Captain Trips (that’s what PH and I have been calling this cold we picked up out there, because it keeps lingering. We both still have coughs. Babby seems totally recovered). And I remember ear infection pain from my childhood and it’s awful. His painful spurts seem to be more sporadic. He’s cheerful enough most of the time, but he just can’t stay asleep because he wakes up screaming.

Not really sure what to do about it, besides tough it out and offer him teething rings. Tylenol/Advil might help a little, but not much. I wish a tooth would break through so at least we’d know that this is teething and not something else.

So I am very tired, and trying to shake the feeling that my baby is disapproving of my inability to help him…

"Tsk, Tsk Tsk..."