It has been a busy and tiring stretch lately, busy enough that I barely had time to even look at the blog.
Our daughter got sick first
On Saturday, June 1, Children’s Day, we took the kids out to eat and have some fun. They spent the day climbing, running around, and playing hard, and by the end they were drenched in sweat. That night, after we got home, they even had ice cream, which made them especially happy.
Early the next morning, our daughter started running a slight fever. She was groggy and not herself. I guessed it might have been from getting chilled after sweating so much the day before, or maybe the ice cream didn’t help. I felt a little guilty too, like a moment of letting things slide had immediately backfired.
We got up right away and took her to the hospital. After a blood test, it turned out her serum amyloid protein was elevated, which suggested inflammation. At that point she was still in fairly good spirits, so the doctor prescribed some medicine and sent us home.
But after two days on the medication, there still wasn’t much improvement. She kept having fever on and off, complained of stomach pain, and was prone to vomiting. So I took leave from work and brought her to Shanghai Children’s Medical Center for another check.
There too, she needed IV treatment: cephalosporin and azithromycin, two bottles in total, and each session lasted more than four hours. She went for three straight days. By the second day, the fever was basically gone, but she still occasionally said her stomach hurt. The doctor also arranged an abdominal ultrasound and was very gentle throughout the exam. The result showed that her intestines were moving a bit too quickly, so she was prescribed some probiotics as well.
After the three days of IV drips, she finally got back to her usual lively self. On Saturday we went back for another blood test, and all the indicators had returned to normal.
Then our son got sick
Just one week after our daughter recovered, our son started feeling unwell too.
It was Friday, June 14. That afternoon he said he didn’t feel good, and as soon as he got home from school he lay down. When I checked, he had a fever. We gave him some medicine we had at home, but it did not seem to help much, and he was also prone to vomiting.
We went to the hospital early the next morning. He also needed IV treatment, but his fever was much harder to bring down. At its highest it went over 40°C. Even after taking ibuprofen suspension, his temperature only dropped to around 38°C.
He had another blood test, mainly for a five-pathogen respiratory panel, and the result came back positive for adenovirus. There is no especially effective treatment for adenovirus itself at the moment, so recovery mostly depends on the body’s own immune response. Even so, the IV treatment still had to continue. Just like with his sister, it was two bottles each time, and around four hours per session.
Five days later, the fever finally came down, and he was clearly doing much better.
Unfortunately, the week he got sick was also the week of the school’s final assessments. He missed the entire week of school and therefore missed the exams too, which left him pretty upset. While he was on the IV drip, he even asked me to review the key test material with him. He still had a small hope that he might somehow make it to the exam.
Exams matter, of course, but health matters more. The most important thing is not getting sick.
Registering our daughter for nursery
This year, our daughter became eligible to start nursery in the second half of the year.
Compared with other districts in Shanghai, Pudong’s public nursery class notice came out relatively late. On June 11, the district released the list of kindergartens in each subdistrict or town that would open nursery classes, along with enrollment plans, eligibility requirements, and admission rules.
From 9:00 a.m. on June 14 to 4:00 p.m. on June 16, parents had to complete the online information registration for nursery applicants by scanning the QR code issued by their local subdistrict or town.
After the enrollment information was published, I rode around to look at the nearby kindergartens offering nursery classes. After comparing them, I narrowed it down to three options. All three were Shanghai model kindergartens. Two of them were extremely close to our home, basically just 50 meters from the entrance of our residential compound, and one of those was the kindergarten assigned to our neighborhood. The third one was a bit farther away, but it was right next to our son’s primary school.
At first, I wanted to apply to the neighborhood-assigned kindergarten. But it had been under renovation since last year and only finished earlier this year, which made me a little uneasy.
In the end, we applied to the kindergarten next to our son’s school. It also had the strictest admission requirements:
- household registration and residence had to match;
- the child needed local Shanghai household registration;
- the family needed property ownership within the same subdistrict or town.
If the number of applicants exceeded the enrollment quota, children would be ranked by age in months.
We met the condition that household registration and residence were aligned, and our daughter was born in November, which meant she was relatively older within the eligible group. So we chose that kindergarten and did not agree to being reassigned to another one.
We were then notified to go in on the 18th for document verification. We prepared the household registration booklet, property certificate, and the child’s birth certificate, along with photocopies of each. Once those were submitted, all that was left was to wait and see whether she would be admitted.
At 9:00 a.m. on the 28th, the school called to let us know she had been accepted. We went to pick up the admission notice.
Along with the admission notice, they also gave us some documents with instructions and a parent meeting notice. There are a few things to get ready in advance, including a medical checkup for the child and opening a bank card.
Starting in September, our daughter will be going to school too.