A new Christmas Eve tradition??

Well, because we couldn't spend Christmas Eve with family, Eleanor decided she'd like to spice things up a bit for us today. We spent the first few hours of Christmas Eve morning at the Urgent Care Center.

This morning, when I got Eleanor up for her bottle, I noticed that her left ear (and pretty much the whole left side of her head) was bright red. Because we had noticed that she was teething yesterday, I immediately thought our poor baby must have another (her second) ear infection. I left a message for the nurse on-call at our doctor's office, who immediately called me back with the following advice: 'I am 99.99% sure she is not teething. She's too young, and it's impossible that she's getting the teeth in the location you are describing, but you need to take her to Urgent Care to get antibiotics for the ear infection.' That really sent me into a minor panic (I think that's an oxymoron) because my baby definitely had something that looked like teeth poking out of her gums, and if they weren't teeth, what in the heck were they?

So, we went to the Urgent Care center where a line forms very early. After about an hour wait (during which several people in the waiting room gave us and our screaming baby menacing glares), we saw the doctor. When we told him we thought she was teething, he gave us one of those grins that means, "if it weren't really unprofessional, I'd laugh in your face right now." He actually gave us a spiel about how babies' teeth develop and the proper order of their arrival. Then, he looked in her mouth and said, "Well, that's very unusual." There they were- her pearly white first molars poking through her little red gums. Hmmm. Anyway, he wrote a prescription for antibiotics, and we left.

Wait, the fun doesn't stop there. I took the prescription to our local CVS, which my gut instinct told me not to do because we knew from our past experiences that they could screw up an order for cough drops. I had the prescription filled with relative ease, which I should have known was too good to be true. I took it home where I found Eleanor napping. We decided to wait until she awoke on her own to begin the medicine. Good thing- because the pharmacy called two hours later and said, "Oops! We gave you the wrong prescription." Once again, I will withhold my un-Christianlike thoughts...

I hope this isn't the beginning of a yearly event.