We're going all the way back to Halloween.  We carved pumpkins on Saturday.  They don't last long here in Missouri, so you have to wait until the last minute.  From left to right, they belong to Ben, me, Sydney, Tansy, Zachary, and Tyler.

On Sunday, we made our traditional Ding Dong spiders.  Tyler didn't care about the instructions, but he enjoyed himself anyway.

The fancy one with the yellow and black legs is Ben's.  Mine is the one sneaking up behind him.

The kids were really excited to go trick-or-treating.  On base, it goes from 6:00 to 8:00.  Ben was working swing shift (4:00 to midnight, which usually turned into 2:00 a.m.) so the kids had to wait until he came home for his dinner break at 7:00 so we could all go together.  They were absolutely tortured for the first hour watching all of the other kids come and go.  They managed to have pretty heavy buckets themselves when we got home.

Last weekend, Sydney started breaking out in hives.  Now Sydney does this occasionally.  When her allergies are bad in the spring or when she has a fever, she can get hives.  Sometimes she'll get a mild case for no reason at all and a dose of Benadryl will knock it out.  That's what I thought was happening when I got a call Saturday night from Sydney saying she was really itchy.  Ben and I were on a date and the babysitter didn't know what to do.  I had her give Syd some Benadryl and went back to eat my dinner.

After I dropped the babysitter off, I came home to check on Sydney.  She still had a lot of hives so I gave her some Claritin and sent her to bed.  She was fine most of the day Sunday, but at dinner she started itching.  She had about four dozen hives the size of the pencil-eraser.  Ben and I couldn't come up with any reason for her to be breaking out so we had her take a shower to see if there was some on her skin that was irritating her.  Bad idea.  The heat made them spread, and in less than an hour and half, nearly half of her skin was covered.  There were a lot on her face and around her mouth, and I worried that they would spread to her airways.

I took her to the ER where they monitored her for a couple of hours since she does have asthma.  The Benadryl finally started working and she was looking better by the time we left with a prescription for Prednisone.

I kept her home from school on Monday since she still had a lot of hives and wanted her close in case she got bad again.  Besides, I just couldn't ask a 7-year-old to go to school looking like that.  I gave her everything the doctor at the ER told me too, and I was applying hydrocortisone cream like body lotion, but by late afternoon, she was going crazy with the itching.  I called her allergist to ask what else I could give her.  He had me add some Zyrtec and said he wanted to see her Wednesday if she was still getting hives.

On Tuesday, she only had hives on her feet and ankles, so I sent her to school.  The nurse called at 11:00 to see if she could use some Solarcaine to ease her itching and keep her at school.  That worked for a while, but a half an hour before school let out, she had broken out pretty badly and the kids in her class kept asking what was wrong with her face.  I picked her up and brought her home.  I loaded her up with her meds because he had her swimming test that night and was freaking out about missing it.  She made it and passed her test.

On Wednesday I called the allergist and took Sydney in at 11:30.  He pretty much said the same thing as everyone else, "She has a bad case of hives."  Isn't that what I told you?  He put her on a new medicine and said that if it didn't work, the next meds would also be sedatives, and he wanted to avoid going there.  He also said she was fine to attend school and do anything she wanted to.

Since we were in town, I picked up a couple of things I needed, then headed home.  I got Sydney some lunch then put her back in the car to get her to school for the afternoon.  I was nearly there when I remembered that it was an early out day and school would be dismissed at 1:00.  It was 12:50.  We went in anyway so I could talk to the nurse and Sydney's teacher about her medication and condition.

Fortunately, the new meds worked and Sydney has been hive-free for two and a half days.  Sorry for the long story.

I got all of the parts for my food rotation system this week, and Ben and I built it on Friday.  I would tell you the story about that, but only one long story per post.  Here was the condition of my food storage before the rotation shelf and the new shelf we bought at Walmart.

And here are the after shots.

Doesn't it make you smile just to look at it?  Aaahhh.

The kids had their Primary program today at church.  I am so glad that we are done singing those songs for a while.  My fingers are tired of playing them.  They did a great job.  It was a lot of fun to watch them.

Ben goes back to day shift starting tomorrow.  Finally, life is getting back to normal.  I hope.