oooh Sandy......

Well, I must say for the week prior to Sandy's appearance I just didn't see the big deal.

Yeah, we'll get rain, and it will suck and I will have to cancel a bunch of sessions I said.

Never did I think I would be laying in my bed the night of the storm, terrified and having a damn panic attack thinking my house was going to rip apart from the winds.

We survived the night with no damage to our home, but with a loss of power. It was expected anyway so we were prepared.

When the boys and I got up I was in desperate need of coffee so I decided to venture out into the neighborhood and see the damage as well as find someplace to get coffee.

I found our mcdonalds was open but had a huge line at the drive thru...same with the first Dunkin I found. I made it to the last point I was willing to drive to since I realized all the lines would be that long, which was the DD on Hamilton/CC. I drove into line which was wrapped around the building, and probably 20+ cars long....

And we waited. I had my camera with me just in case I saw something crazy from the storm damage but I saw nothing cool so I just decided to photo-document our first post-hurricane day ever :)

We had juice boxes instead of milk for breakfast since I didn't want to open the fridge and let all the cold air out. Aidan was PISSED. He wanted chocolate milk (chocolate pediasure) which is what he's had for breakfast since he was Mason's age. A massive fit ensued of course, but he finally gave up and drank his juice.

Mason was in his glory and if you know my kid it's because you know he LOVES juice boxes.

We also had pop-tarts (thanks Grandpa for stocking us up!) which was Aidan's choice, and Animal Crackers, which was Mason's choice....even though Mason ended up eating all of my damn pop tarts too. Piggy.

Mason played with his talking flashlight while Aidan watched some Disney Jr on my iPhone.

I drank my coffee and read a whopping 2 pages on my kindle.

We moved upstairs where the boys played for quite some time in Aidan's room in the closet, opening and closing the door and yelling Surprise! each time it opened.

At this point you can see Aidan's hives were starting to spread across his face. I gave him Benadryl and we kept playing.

We decided to go out to lunch with Michele, Wells & Maddox since we were getting a little chilly. We went to our McDonalds where I swear half our town was playing with their kids.

I bought my kids Happy Meals which neither ate because they were too excited to play! Mason even got to go up into the big play area with Wells helping him out. He did great and I didn't even have to climb up and rescue him!

After we got home I put both Guys down for a nap and the power came back on! Hooray!!

But when Aidan woke from his nap his face was so covered with hives that I started to panic (he had come home with his usual mystery hives on his abdomen on Monday after work). A friend of mine is a nurse and she suggested I call the after-hours on call Dr since the pediatricians office was closed due to the storm. She was concerned that he was getting them on his eyes which is a mucous membrane, meaning that other mucous membranes could be affected next, one being your throat. He was also itching, which he hd never done before with the hives.

When I called and spoke to the triage nurse at the Dr's office she told me to bring him to the ER. This was where I totally panicked. Michele offered to keep Mason, so Aidan and I hopped in the car and off we went. 

I called Ryan on the way and he was already at the hospital working, so he said he would meet us there. The beauty of having a hubby that's a surgeon is he knows the ER docs. A perk I get for eating dinner alone. A lot. I guess if you can call that a perk : /    .....

So we walked in, showed him to the pediatric ER doc who suggested it might be a penicillin allergy since we had been giving him amoxicillin for a sinus infection. He told ryan the steroid dose he should be on and suggested we follow up with an allergist. In fact he even recommended the allergist we already see for Mason.

Soooooooo.......I think the penicillin thing is crap. If any of you have known me for a while you will know that ever since Aidan was Mason's age he's gotten bouts of what we refer to as "mystery hives".

They appear on his trunk/groin/abdomen, usually last a day and then are gone.

There's never a time that he's been on amoxicillin and gotten them before. He gets them so randomly in fact that we've never been able to attribute them to anything. He's even gone to the pediatrician in the middle of a break-out who suggested they might be his body's response to a virus. Who knows? 

The steroids definitely helped and I'm hoping that the Benadryl I was giving him had helped too.

So that he doesn't look like THIS again. And remember this is only his face you can see...he was covered from his feet all the way to his head!