Trip to the Doctor for Salma

Salma has experienced several bouts of diarrhea and night-time vomiting over the last few weeks. Monday night she began vomiting around 2am and continued every few hours. She couldn't hold anything down. We called Dr. Medrano, Salma's pediatrician, and make an appointment to see him that same day. That's him with Salma in the photo above. You can see that she's not in a good mood.

Dr. Medrano speaks fluent English, and despite the photo above he's good with children and Salma is generally quite comfortable with him. He's a good doctor.

By the time we saw him in the afternoon Salma seemed to be doing better. She had not vomited since 8am or so and she was able to keep her drink and food down. Dr. Medrano says that there are some viruses going around, and if the problem reoccurs we'll get a stool sample and analyze it, but for now just keep her hydrated.

Today she's much better. It's hard to know what the problem is exactly. Our house is clean - we have a full time maid - but we're going to have to start keeping the floors pristine, because Salma will eat anything she finds on the floor, including cat food, insect parts or gecko droppings. Lovely, I know.

Also, I believe that Ani, Salma's nanny, is a very clean person, but just in case we'll have a talk with her about the importance of thorough hand-washing after changing Salma's diapers or going to the bathroom.

We also went to the Riba Smith grocery store for things we can't get here in El Valle, like tofu, diet root beer, almonds, cauliflower, and nice cheeses. We got back from the city late, and Salma went straight to bed. Here she is this morning doing one of her favorite things:


Now, before we get any lectures, we only let her watch a little TV each day, and she normally sits in her mama's lap a good distance from the TV. But if we let her up she heads straight for the TV, holds on to the edge of the cabinet as you see here, and dances to the Sesame Street songs by bobbing up and down and shaking her rump from side to side. It's very funny to see. We'll have to make a video.