We had a bit of a rough night last night. I noticed Zoe was pretty hot when she had a nap yesterday after not really eating much lunch. She still had a mild fever after her nap, so I gave her some paracetamol (aka acetaminophen, that one weirded me out when I moved to the US) and called for a home doctor to check her ears out.
Her ears were fine, but her throat was a little red. The doctor said it was probably a virus. Her temperature wasn't so high at bed time, so I skipped the paracetamol, and she went to bed fine.
She did wake up at about 1:30am and it took me until 3am to get her back to bed. I think it was a combination of the fever and trying to phase out her white noise, but she just didn't want to sleep in her bed or her room. At 3am I admitted defeat and let her sleep with me.
She had only a slightly elevated temperature this morning, and otherwise seemed in good spirits. We were supposed to go to a family lunch today, because my sister and brother are in town with their respective families, but I figured we'd skip that on account that Zoe may have still had something, and coupled with the poor night's sleep, I wasn't sure how much socialising she was going to be up for.
My ear has still been giving me grief, and I had a home doctor check it yesterday as well, and he said the ear canal was 90% blocked. First thing this morning I called up to make an appointment with my regular doctor to try and get it flushed out. The earliest appointment I could get was 10:15am.
So we trundled around the corner to my doctor after a very slow start to the day. I got my ear cleaned out and felt like a million bucks afterwards. We went to Woolworths to order an undecorated mud slab cake, so I can try doing a trial birthday cake. I've given up on trying to do the sitting minion, and significantly scaled back to just a flat minion slab cake. The should be ready tomorrow.
The family thing was originally supposed to be tomorrow, and was only moved to today yesterday. My original plan had been to take Zoe to a free Dora the Explorer live show that was on in the Queen Street Mall.
I decided to revert back to the original plan, but by this stage, it was too late to catch the 11am show, so the 1pm show was the only other option. We had a "quick" lunch at home, which involved Zoe refusing the eat the sandwich I made for her and me convincing her otherwise.
Then I got a time-sensitive phone call from a friend, and once I'd finished dealing with that, there wasn't enough time to take any form of public transport and get there in time, so I decided to just drive in.
We parked in the Myer Centre car park, and quickly made our way up to the mall, and made it there comfortably with 5 minutes to spare.
The show wasn't anything much to phone home about. It was basically just 20 minutes of someone in a giant Dora suit acting out was was essentially a typical episode of Dora the Explorer, on stage, with a helper. Zoe started out wanting to sit on my lap, but made a few brief forays down to the "mosh pit" down the front with the other kids, dancing around.
After the show finished, we had about 40 minutes to kill before we could get a photo with Dora, so we wandered around the Myer Centre. I let Zoe choose our destinations initially, and we browsed a cheap accessories store that was having a sale, and then we wandered downstairs to one of the underground bus station platforms.
After that, we made our way up to Lincraft, and browsed. We bought a $5 magnifying glass, and I let Zoe do the whole transaction by herself. After that it was time to make our way back down for the photo.
Zoe made it first in line, so we were in and out nice and quick. We got our photos, and they gave her a little activity book as well, which she thought was cool, and then we headed back down the car park.
In my haste to park and get top side, I hadn't really paid attention to where we'd parked, and we came down via different elevators than we went up, so by the time I'd finally located the car, the exit gate was trying to extract an extra $5 parking out of me. Fortunately I was able to use the intercom at the gate and tell my sob story of being a nincompoop, and they let us out without further payment.
We swung by the Valley to clear my PO box, and then headed home. Zoe spontaneously announced she'd had a fun day, so that was lovely.
We only had about an hour and half to kill before Sarah was going to pick up Zoe, so we just mucked around. Zoe looked at stuff around the house with her magnifying glass. She helped me open my mail. We looked at some of the photos on my phone. Dayframe and a Chromecast is a great combination for that. We had a really lovely spell on the couch where we took turns to draw on her Magna Doodle. That was some really sweet time together.
Zoe seemed really eager for her mother to arrive, and kept asking how much longer it was going to be, and going outside our unit's front door to look for her.
Sarah finally arrived, and remarked that Zoe felt hot, and so I checked her temperature, and her fever had returned, so whatever she has she's still fighting off.
I decided to do my Easter egg shopping in preparation for Sunday. A friend suggested this cool idea of leaving rabbit paw tracks all over the house in baby powder, and I found a template online and got that all ready to go.
I had a really great yoga class tonight. Probably one of the best I've had in a while in terms of being able to completely clear my head.
I'm looking forward to an uninterrupted night's sleep tonight.