The Worst Weekend...ever?

Sorry I have taken a short hiatus from blogging... I think the Iceland posts really wiped me out on blogging for awhile! So, most of August has passed by now and it's been a definite mixed bag of a month for us. The first weekend of August was completely unreal- and not in a good way. We were headed to my friend Allison Lefrak's wedding in Washington D.C. on Friday afternoon, and we made it as far as our first leg at JFK airport in NY (though the flight was delayed 2 hrs). It was hard to tell what was happening outside JFK airport in our makeshift, windowless, "while-we're-under-construction" Jet Blue terminal, but sometime after we arrived I guess they completely closed the airport due to dangerous thunderstorms and had to divert all their planes to land in neighboring states. So... to make a long story short, our flight was basically cancelled (after 12 hours in the airport they could not even estimate when an appropriate plane might arrive to take us to DC). At about 3AM, there was a flight that was leaving back to Burlington, so having reached our limit of tolerance and patience we called it quits and went back home.

Allison and Malcolm's wedding (thanks for the photo Whit)

We made it back home to VT just as the sun was coming up at 5:30AM. I was really sad & disappointed to be missing Allison's wedding and a rare chance to catch up with all of my friends from Colgate at once. But we were also exhausted so we asked my mom to watch Aiden so that we could get some sleep.

I'm definitely upset I missed this moment...

As it turned out, it must have been fate that we took the flight back to Burlington. By the time we met up with my parents, Aiden (who had been totally fine at 5:30 AM) was having real trouble breathing. We called the pediatrician who said that she didn't think we needed to take him in (yet) if he was still eating and drinking and smiling once in awhile. But by about 8PM on Saturday night, he was really struggling for air and his little tummy was heaving in and out with each breath. So we rushed him to the emergency room at the hospital and spent several hours holding him on a small gurney while they tried to administer different inhalant steroids that only seemed to do any good for about 10 minutes at a time.

Hospital Emergency areas are always a nightmare. It was a BUSY Saturday night at Fletcher Allen Hospital too- on the other side of the curtain from us was a completey drunk man who had had his lip bit in half by a dog and was cursing and screaming at the nurses to bring him painkillers and to "stop eating donuts and hurry the hell up". Also there was a heart attack, and a man who hit a moose on his motorcycle (never a good mix). So you can imagine that little Aiden got quite an education that night.

By 3AM (are you sensing a pattern here?) the doctors told us it was probably just viral croup, but they wanted to admit him to the Children's Hospital anyway for observation overnight. So we were wheeled upstairs (one hall down from the infamous room in which I spent 2 months last summer!) and a nurse hooked Aiden up to about 70 wired gadgets stuck on his chest and toes and plunked him in what looked for all the world like a steel-barred monkey cage at the zoo. Poor little fussa! He did manage to sleep a little, and I slept a little in a pull out chair in the room. Andy found a place to crash in a Ronald McDonald quiet room somewhere.

A bad camera-phone picture of Aiden's hospital monkey cage. Notice how tired Andy looks...

In the morning, Aiden was a little better, and he improved as the day went on. We were chomping at the bit to get out of there by early afternoon - Aiden was definitely sick of getting all tangled up in electrode wires and being confined to his monkey cage. Luckily they liberated us shortly thereafter with a prescription for some steroids and we went home to squeeze a little sleep out of the weeekend before work on monday. At some point you just have to laugh that a weekend couldn't possibly get any worse!