Baby Jasper and strep throat

First the happy news - I'm an aunt again! Baby Jasper made his entrance into the world on the 7th. Congratulations to Megan, Paul and Lincoln! I was fortunate enough to be with Megan in Minneapolis for her pregnancy with Lincoln. I was there in the hospital, waiting for Lincoln to be born, and I got to see him grow up-close and in person for the first eight months of his life. Then I moved out to Hawaii and now, aside from the few trips home, I've been watching Lincoln grow up via Skype. I thank my lucky stars every day that the technology exists that I can spend face time with Lincoln and my family. It was tough missing out on Megan's second pregnancy and the arrival of Jasper, though. There are times you just want to hug people and, well, technology hasn't evolved that far yet. I had my first Skype session with Jasper, Megan and Paul 24 hours after he was born. How cool is that?

He's adorable, of course. Look at all of that dark hair! Makes me wonder how much he'll look like his fair-haired big brother. I'm really looking forward to getting home and being able to hold Jasper and playing t-ball with Lincoln. Since I don't have a photo of me and Jasper yet, and I'm all excited about my nephews tonight, here's one of my favorite photos of me and Lincoln from December:

On the down side of things, I started getting a sore throat yesterday that continued to get worse as the day/night went. For background here, a few years ago I got strep throat. It was one of those sore throats that I ignored, thinking that it was just a regular sore throat and would go away in a couple days. I woke up in the middle of the third night because of the pain. My throat was so constricted that I had a hard time breathing and swallowing actually made me tear up, it was so painful. I went into the doctor to have it checked. The nurse had me open and say "ahhhhh" to swab my throat and gasped. She said she could hardly get the swab to the back of my throat to take the culture. She said that she hadn't seen a throat like that in a long time, if ever. I was somewhat comforted that I wasn't making up my situation. (This whole time I was spitting into a cup because I couldn't bear to swallow.) Of course, the test came back positive for strep. I was given Tylenol with Codeine and some antibiotics.

After a couple of days I was back to normal, but ever since that incident I have a lingering fear that every sore throat will devolve into something like that strep incident. Like I said, my sore throat started out yesterday and got progressively worse over the next 24 hours. I chided myself for being paranoid, but I called the doctor's office this morning to ask to come in. They didn't have any appointments available but, maybe it was my mentioning that I had had strep before, the nurse managed to squeeze me in for a quick strep test. By the time I got to the clinic for the test my throat was pretty much on fire - it wasn't as bad as my last strep bout. That time I actually felt like I swallowing shards of glass that were shredding my throat. This time it just felt like I was being stabbed in the throat with a millions pins. Believe me, that is actually an improvement over last time.

It took about 15 minutes for the test to come back positive. Honestly, I was surprised that it was strep. I would have bet money that I was overreacting and just had a regular ol' sore throat. Anyhow, I've got my arsenal of Motrin and penicillin to get me through the next few days. So on the downside, while technology couldn't let me hold Baby Jasper, on the upside it also couldn't expose him to my strep when I got to see him yesterday. Here's one more photos, just because he's so sweet: