Kaylee came down with the chicken pox last Friday (10 days ago). It was a bit of a surprise because we weren’t aware she had been exposed. But, in a way, we were happy that she contracted chicken pox now, so we can get it out of the way while she’s still young.
Taking care of her on top of working has been a handful—which is why I didn’t get any blog posts out last week. She has wanted to nurse and be held a lot, and has been whining more than normal due to the itching (poor baby), but overall she has been a real trooper.
She is still mostly all smiles and is happy to just crawl around and play with her sister a lot of the time. That surprised me. She hasn’t liked the fact that we’ve kept socks or gloves on her hands all of the time to keep her from scratching though. I’m just happy she’s still too young to take them off. It will probably be a different story with Zoë.
Oatmeal baths have been a fun activity for Kaylee. And calamine lotion seems to be helping with the itching while also helping to dry the chicken pox out. I also made a broth of carrots and cilantro on the advice of an older Chinese woman at Kmart. Kaylee liked drinking that, but I’m not sure how much it helped.
She’s healing very nicely everywhere except in her diaper area. I think that’s going to take a bit longer than everything else to heal, even with giving her naked baby time and keeping a clean diaper on her as much as possible. I think pretty much all of her pox have scabbed over, so she isn’t contagious anymore, but we’re still keeping her at home to be sure—and keeping Zoë at home in case she’s contagious.
Now we wait to see if Zoë gets the chicken pox. I’d love to get it out of the way for her too. The incubation period is typically 10-21 days, so we should hopefully know by this weekend if she’s going to get it!
Complete Exhaustion and Total Joy