Wheee!

The babysitter was sick yesterday, so I stayed home with the kids while DH went to our home group Bible study by himself.

The girls and I had a lot of fun. Baby E had been in a yellow mood all day, so she wasn't too high maintainance and I was able to more easily do some things with the other girls.

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We had some of our farm-raised ground beef and the rest of the potato/carrot roast I had cut up on Saturday.

We all really like the roasted vegetables, although the girls complained a bit that there was no cauliflower today. Thank you to those who suggested roasting it; that technique turned cauliflower from a detested vegetable into a household favorite here.

After dinner I taught the girls how to play pick-up-sticks. They are just at the right age for that sort of game now, and they really liked it. Even Baby E got in on the action a bit.

Baby E got really fussy during dinner. She was so grumpy afterwards, fussing and crying, that I attempted to put her down for a short nap.

While she screamed in her crib for 15 or 20 minutes, I played a Memory game with AJ and M&M. M&M is particularly good at that sort of game--she remembered the cards that had been turned over earlier much better than either AJ or I did. She remembers people's faces and places we've been before very well, too, unlike AJ and me.

I finally ended up getting Baby E up without having napped and still crying.

I really needed to find some way to entertain her so she wouldn't whine and insist on being carried constantly. Then I hit on the perfect plan: I took the little slide from the playroom, carried it down to the family room, and surrounded it with pillows.



All three girls loved it. It's amazing how simply changing the location of a toy can make it seem like a new toy all over again. Unfortunately, after I snapped the first couple of pictures my camera decided to start acting up. So the pictures I took of all three girls playing together didn't upload correctly.

AJ got very tired and started crying and saying she wanted to go to bed, so I let her go straight to bed without doing her chores, about an hour early.

Meanwhile, M&M and I modified a recipe to make thumbprint cookies with cranberry-orange filling. Baby E was well-occupied with the slide, so it was nice to have a relaxed time doing something fun with M&M. AJ ended up coming back down after resting for awhile, just in time to eat a cookie.

Both girls told me later that it was "a so, so fun night!"

After the older girls were in bed, I had a chance to focus on Baby E again. She was still a bit fussy and grumpy when she paused in her playing. But the slide had distracted her for quite a while and she had great fun with it.

As I got her ready for bed, I noticed something interesting. I'd noticed a day or two ago that her cheeks seemed slightly more red and mottled than usual, but brushed it off with a mental note to keep an eye on it. I hadn't noticed it again since then.



But last night it was more definite. Still very faint and scattered, but there were definitely little raised red bumps patterned on her cheeks. Baby acne, I wondered?

I took a closer look.



I wasn't sure, but I thought it looked more like eczema or a little rash than like acne. Still, it was just a faint bit on her cheeks.

Or was it?



As I looked, I realized that it went across her cheeks and wrapped around behind her ears and down the back of her neck. The same little raised bumps were in the slight diaper rash I had noticed earlier, and she had a few tiny raised red bumps on the insides of her wrists, too.



Very strange. But, still, whatever it was it was fairly faint and scattered. It could be allergy-related, I'm sure. Or I suppose it could be something like a heat rash?

It's certainly similar to the diaper rash she gets when she ingests corn or soy, and the full-body rash she got the time she dumped corn- and soy-containing cracker crumbs over herself. It's often subtle when that happens--just faint enough that I wonder whether I'm really seeing a rash or not. What do you think? Rash, or something else?

I made sure to give Baby E a bath before I put her to bed just in case it was a reaction to something on her skin.

We ate a lot of potatoes and carrots for the first time in a long while on Saturday and again tonight. Baby E refused to touch them, but I ate them.

I'd also given all three girls scrambled eggs about an hour before dinner last night, to tide them over while I was cooking. E's sudden escalation in fussiness started in the middle of eating them. It was the first time in several weeks she'd had eggs, but she's never seemed to have a problem with them in the past--eggs were something we watched very carefully when introduced. I didn't eat the eggs.

Now I'm not sure whether to give E some of the oven pancake made with eggs that AJ and M&M had for lunch.

The raised red spots are fading today, though still faintly there. I can't be absolutely sure how or if any of this is related, but it's definitely something I'll add to my records and charts. I'm trying so hard to find the balance between not missing anything and not jumping to unjustified conclusions about causation.

After all the comments I've gotten from doctors lately about how "you can't blame everything on food/allergies" I want to make sure I'm covering my bases.