Lake Street Cottage: Drum Roll Please!

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to my blog, Lake Street Cottage!

My idea for this blog is fairly straight-forward and simple: chronicle my adventures in motherhood, my hobbies and anything else that comes my way!

I won't bombard you with a lengthy post off the bat, I wouldn't want to scare you away! =] But I did want to give you a little more of peek into my life, aside from what the "About" page would tell you.

I'm 25, and work at the local nursing home, Bartels Lutheran Retirement Community. I've been happily employed there since February of 2008. I am a CNA/CMA and currently work the night shift 3 nights a week as Weekend Package - I work two 12-hour shifts and get paid for 32 hours of work, pretty cool right? This means I'm home 4 days a week, and that's very important to me with little Lily at home. I love working with the elderly and doing things for them that they can no longer do for themselves. I deal mostly with residents that have some form of dementia and it certainly makes every day I work something new and interesting - you never know what's going to happen!

Due to my work schedule, a parent needs to be home with the baby overnight and in the morning/early afternoon, so Andrew quit his job with Hy-Vee and is a Stay At Home Dad. It's been quite the adjustment for our family, but it's really the ideal situation for us right now. We both get family time and individual time with Lily, which is what matters most.

Life has certainly changed for the better since Lily Nicole was born on April 5th. She's growing up so fast! It's fun to watch her change every day, but so upsetting that she's getting older at the same time. I want her to stay little forever! I guess I'm even more "hovering mother" because she was so sick after she was born. About 6 hours after she was born, the nurses noticed she was really hot to the touch and checked for a fever, which she had. They kept an eye on it over night and around 1am on April 6th they decided to call the Doctor to get her opinion. They did some blood work and noticed her CRP level (C-reactive protein) was very high, so they started her on IV antibiotics at 3am. They of course told me all of this, but I was still pretty out of it, having had a complicated delivery. The antibiotics were a 12 hour course, so they would redraw her blood at 3pm and we would discuss with the doctor from that point where to go from there. After her 3pm draw, her CRP level had increased again, from 1.7 to 2.7, and her Doctor consulted with a Neonatalologist from Cedar Rapids who told her that he suspected that Lily had become septic and needed to be transported to the nearest NICU immediately to be put on a stronger course of antibiotics. All in all, Lily was in the NICU for 7 days to complete her medications and after a full day of antibiotics, her lab work reflected that they were working well. The Neonatalologist said she will have no long-term effect from being septic and that it's extremely unlikely for it to reoccur. He did stress how very sick she was and to be careful of other people visiting the first 2 months. She's completely healthy and in the 65th percentile at her 2 month appointment for everything. She has her 4 month appointment coming up in a couple weeks!