ABC Scrabble and Bye Bye Live Trees

Eli continues to love playing with the Scrabble board and letters. It's at the top of his toy rotation with his Duplos, puzzles, books, alphabet stamps and toy trains. He likes to dump them all out and place them one at a time carefully on the board. The other day the game mutated a little. On his own accord, he decided he wanted to do the whole alphabet, first he found all the A's, then all the B's, etc. It actually turned into a good game, because Scott and I were worried with all the playing we'd lost some of the letters. But, with the help of the chart on the side of the board, we are now ensuring on a daily basis that we have all nine A's, all two B's, two C's etc. In these pictures you can see how serious his expression is when he's concentrating, his interesting letter arrangement (he starts from the bottom of the board and works his way left to right -- keep in mind the picture of the board was taken upside down) and how Kodi likes to help. I had to pet her and love her the whole time so she didn't sit on the board or the letters.







And, now for last night's health scare. Scott and I spent about three hours at the emergency room last night for me. I'm okay, but my asthma's been really bad for several weeks now. On Thursday, I realized that my rescue inhaler was no longer doing the job, so using my allergist's standing suggestions I ordered a round of steroids and upped my maintenance inhaler to the highest dose. Now, it's always tricky with my asthma while I'm pregnant. Obviously, the baby and I both need oxygen, but I try to limit my medication intake too. So, I think I may have erred on the side of medication caution and waited too long. After having the meds that my allergist suggests when my asthma flares up for 2 1/2 days I was feeling no relief and getting worse and worse. So, we called my OB and she suggested I go to the ER. She even called ahead so they would take me seriously -- it worked. Right after taking my paperwork they whisked me back to a room, and started working on me. So, baby and I are doing welll as possible under the circumstances. They gave me IV steroids and a breathing treatment as well as checking all me and the baby's vitals. They toyed with the idea of admitting me depending on all my numbers, but they were impressed so they sent us home, and told me to triple my dose of steriods till I saw the allergist on Monday. I felt pretty good last night, and today I'm back to feeling fair. I'm dizzy and can't get my lungs as full of air as I'd like, but I'm definitely better.

All in all, this means we will probably never have a real tree in our house again. I think it was one of my main triggers, and Scott finally put it out on the back porch last night. Apparently each pregnancy is different in terms of your allergies, they can get better (as they did with Eli), stay the same or get worse (as they definitely have with this pregnancy.) So, now the live Christmas trees will go the way of candles and having fires in the fireplace. Here is the last picture taken of our tree before we took it down. :(