I walked out of the house this morning under an extra load of guilt.

See, Penny's sick again. This time it seems to be a stomach bug; she threw up four times yesterday, and had neither energy nor much of an appetite. But no fever, and the good news is that she was actually in fairly good spirits. So despite the fact that I was the immediate recipient of three of those four quite massive spitups, and I spent the day twitching nervously at every little mouth-smack she made, the day wasn't too terribly awful.

But this morning she seemed to have recovered enough to be hungry and quite irritable about the fact that we were giving her Pedialyte instead of formula. (Pedialyte is the infant version of Gatorade; it replaces water and salts lost to illness, and it's easier on the stomach than things like formula or milk, which have to actually be digested.)

But as anyone who's ever had a stomach virus can attest, you generally start to feel better long before you actually are better. So Matt's staying home with her (he's got the day off - some holiday, eh?) and he has to put up with her crankiness, and he'll have to judge when to try to give her formula again - and deal with the results if she can't keep it down.

So I'm sitting in my clean, quiet, baby-free office feeling the Guilt.

Of course, if she does throw up again today, that means she can't go to daycare tomorrow, so it'll be my turn again.

We had a pretty good weekend up until yesterday, though. We met the Brandts for dinner Friday evening. Penny rejected even her favorite doll to play with a packet of mustard.

I suppose it makes sense, in a way. She's five months old, so everything is new and interesting. The packet squishes interestingly, and it's shiny, and it's a nice size for sticking it in the mouth and gumming it.

In fact, so entranced was she by the mustard packet that Matt and I spent the rest of the weekend distracting her with a packet of duck sauce, which wasn't as shiny, but had the benefit of being clear so she could see it squooshing around. (Also, it would probably be less distressing to her tiny taste buds if she accidently managed to chew it open.)

Saturday afternoon, we dropped her off with my parents so we could run some errands. We exchanged a couple of movies we'd gotten for Christmas, and stopped at the baby clothes consignment shop to buy some socks, and then we went to Sam's Club and gave them a huge pile of money in exchange for, mostly, diapers and formula. Though I did also buy some food for us. (I'm going on Atkins in a couple of weeks, after I get back from my trip. I expect Sam's meat department is going to become my best friend.)

Sunday was my dad's birthday, so since Penny seemed to be feeling a little better by late afternoon, we went over to my parents' house to have dinner with them. We had a nice visit, and Matt and I promised to get Dad's computer upgraded to OS X for his birthday present (he's still on 9.0.4, and the scanner he got for Christmas won't work with it). And Penny was very tired, but she gamely took about half her usual serving of cereal, and a bottle, and kept it all down.

(It wasn't until we got home and I tried to give her a bottle before bed that she threw up again. Sigh.)

Here, let's end with something a bit cuter. Back in December, we had some family portraits made, and I got the results back this weekend. I'm going to take the actual prints and scan them in so I can have digital copies that are bigger than this, but the photographer was nice enough to send me some low-res copies.

Four Generations

...And Baby Makes Three

--Liz