Camping - The Emergency Room

Although our camping trip was overall SUPER SUPER SUPER great, there was one trip that'd we'd rather not have made...yeah, the trip to the good ol' emergency room. It wasn't anything life threatening, but it was still bad enough that we didn't feel we had any other option than to take Tate in to see the Doctor. And what caused this visit? Well, it was a little, itty bitty mosquito - or two or three!!

Tate's bites did get fairly big last summer already but NOTHING even close to what they have done in the past few weeks!!! He got one on his forehead just before we left for camping and it swelled up HUGE!! It went down in about a day though. The 2nd day of camping Tate got two mosquito bites...one on the back of his hand, and one on the inside of his wrist on the other hand. Jonathan brought him inside right away and said that he'd gotten 2 bites and I put some stuff on them right away...it did NOTHING. I watched him swell up right before my very eyes. It was that fast. I couldn't believe it!! I spent the day trying everything I could think of to try and help his bites to stop swelling, but nothing helped at all. They just got more and more and more swollen. It was crazy. By the next morning they were even worse and the one on his wrist had swelled up so bad that his whole arm from his elbow to his hand was really swollen and red and very hot. His hand was about double or triple it's normal size - check it out: And that was the night before...it got worse still! Poor 'lil guy. He was very grumpy - probably because his bites were itching and his arm/hand were hurting because they were so swollen. They were actually starting to get so swollen that they were turning purple so we decided to take him in to emergency and see if there was anything at all they could do. The Dr. at emergency was very strange - he commented more than once that we have one of those "blue eyed, blonde haired kids" who is allergic to everything!! Hmmm...so far this would be the only thing that he seems to be allergic to or to have a major reaction to. Anyways, he told us to give him benadryl - it did not help at all. He gave us some cream for his arm/hand - it did not help at all. He said to put ice on them to help the swelling - it might have been a bit comforting to him because he let us do it without any trouble, but it didn't help the swelling go down. The only thing that helped was time.
So guess what we did for the rest of the trip - watched him like a hawk to make sure no more mosquito's were landing on him!! Thankfully the bugs weren't too bad unless you were out early in the morning or later in the evening and we just kept him in during those times. Oh, and we used lots of bug spray - a kind that is very safe for kids - I'll be telling you more about that later!! It works amazing though for something that is completely natural and safe. ;) So there you have it...our mosquito adventure of the week (btw - Tate learned to say mosquito (sort of :) ) and when he sees one he starts to clap his hands together to try to 'get it' like he saw us doing all week! haha)