Again?!

I can't believe it! the Duggars had another baby! Another girl! They're actually had about twice as many boys as girls before the last girl, so maybe she's wanting to break even. This is child number 17! She is my hero. She looks calmer and happier with 17 than I manage to be with my 4. And I'm not sure I feel qualified to be raising them.

Case in point: I took Jordan to the doctor today. He was complaining that his stomach hurt worse than it ever had and that when he tried to "go" it felt like it was trying to come out where it shouldn't. I'm imagining UTI's and stones being passed and all sorts of horrible things. Then he complained his stomach hurt so bad he couldn't breath. Now, this is a boy who tends to imagine symptoms sometimes to the point that he actually creates them. This is the boy who called us up to the school because he went to the nurse convinced he couldn't feel his heart beating and was convinces he was having a heart attack, the same day that they had shown a film on heart disease.

On the other hand, I remembered that even the boy who cried wolf eventually met one and that maybe this time it was appendicitis. He did say that he felt like he was going to explode. Well, the reason became clear that he felt that way for a completely different reason when the nurse asked when he last had a bowel movement... /sigh/

Yup... I just paid a $20 co-pay to discover that my boy has constipation and gas and just about everything he'd described to me were symptoms I'd felt too many times in my own life to be able to plead ignorance in the matter. I wanted to just crawl in a hole somewhere by the time the doctor came in. How horribly humbling. I tend to pride myself in being able to diagnose simpler maladies so that I only go in to the doctor for true emergencies. And now all of a sudden, I felt like one of those filler patients on House that come in thinking they are mortally ill and find out they've been chewing too much sugarless gum or something.

On the bright side, our very sweet family doctor checked Abby's ear while we were there to make sure her swimmer's ear had cleared up, which I was concerned about because it was still hurting 5 days into the antibiotic drops. So the trip wasn't a complete loss.
Now, you'd think this was a symptom I should recognize in a child by now with my oldest being 9 1/2. But we've been pinching pennies lately, trying to finally put ourselves on a budget, and normally I'm a stickler for keeping fruit, veggies and salad in the house, but for the past 6 weeks or so, about every other week, we are out of such snacks. So it all makes sense.... now... $20 later... /sigh/.