Rashes

On our walk yesterday Zoë and Miriam were running ahead and poor Zoë tripped or slipped and ended up skittering across the road on her tummy. She was wearing footie-jammies (with running shoes)...in August...in Atlanta...because that makes sense...and as she fell the road grabbed her zipper and unzipped her jammies, exposing her poor tummy to the asphalt. She also ripped holes in the knees and elbows of her outfit, poor thing. So she is covered in road rash (and is rather upset about her bloodied, blackened, once-perfectly-pink pyjamas that are probably ready to be tossed). 

We peeled her pyjamas off of her at home and bandaged up all of her wounds and then sat down to listen to a talk by a Hiroshima bombing survivor (more on that later, perhaps).

Since the talk was delivered from Hawaii, it ran a little late into the evening for us, so I got the kids put to bed a little late. Miriam texted me from her bedroom shortly after 10:00 pm saying, "I have a weird, itchy rash all over my body, excluding my legs. It feels really hot while the rest of my skin isn't. Can you check it out tomorrow, please?"

So I texted back saying, "...OR...tonight...!"

I'm not sure why she thought we should leave a thing like that until the morning. Her entire trunk and neck were bright red. If she were an elephant that sentence would have an entirely different meaning, but since she's a person it means that her back and stomach and neck and armpits and shoulders were all covered in a red rash. 

She had no other symptoms (no fever or any sort of malady), so judging from pictures on the internet and her health history (ie. we knew she hadn't been romping around in poison ivy...plus it didn't look like a poison ivy rash...and we hadn't switched laundry detergents or body soaps recently so I didn't think it could be from soaps) we decided she was just covered from head to toe (excluding her legs) in heat rash. I slathered her with calamine lotion and as the breeze from the fan blew across her skin she relaxed a bit and announced that she felt comfortable enough to go to bed. 

That running she did with Zoë must have brought on the heat rash (though I'm not sure why since this is the first time it's happened to her and it wasn't that hot today and the kids run around the block practically every day). She's feeling much better this morning, though, and her rash is mostly gone. 

Zoë is feeling much better, too. A little bruised and still covered with bandaids, but no longer limping.