With her latest cold, she took this even further and is now able to blow boogers into a Kleenex, obsoleting the bulb syringe, with no love lost. When I hear a booger sulking around in her nose, I can raise a Kleenex to her nose and then breath loudly through my nose and then she mimics me, oftentimes blowing the booger out or at least peeking out enough I can grab it with the Kleenex.

Immediately after cake, we opened presents. Belén was starting to look tired, but I think the sugar from the cake kicked in and she and the rest of the kids grabbed their rally caps. They proceeded to make it through all of the gift opening and even played with the toys for a good 30 minutes before people started leaving to hit bedtime.

In our wildest dreams, your father and I could never have imagined how deeply we would fall in love with you. You make our already bright lives even brighter.

This has definitely been one of those incidents that shakes your confidence and makes you realize anything could happen at any minute and totally rock your world. When these sorts of things happen, at least for me it is important to take a step back and recognize we cannot control such things and instead need to take them and deal with them as they come. We can spend our whole life worrying about any host of things which may or not ever materialize. Andy and I choose to not worry about Belén having anything other than HSP until we have a reason to do so.

We are trying to stay positive and attempt to think only minimally about the host of disorders a rheumatologist and hematologist might represent. My ears are still ringing from a phenomenal Ani DiFranco concert and I prefer to stay in my happy ignorance-is-kind-of-blissful-land even though we are very anxious to get answers to our questions. Mostly we just hope all of the bad things are ruled out and the answer is that it will just go away and never come back or at least if it does, will not harm a precious daughter in any way.

Today is my mom’s birthday. We celebrated on Saturday night with a fabulous dinner which included ribs, baked potatoes, fruit salad, mushrooms and wine. Belén kept everyone entertained through dinner and the first part of the night before she went to bed.

Besides the purpura and a few boogers, Belén is an entirely happy girl playing with some new toys from our friends, walking and doing all of the fun things that almost-one-year-olds do. Because of her general demeanor, the doctor yesterday did not seem to be too concerned about her medical state even though he could not explain it. He expected the purpura could spread to the legs again and it has, but he told us not to be concerned unless it moved to her lips and mouth or if her demeanor suddenly changed.

Here are some more pictures from our mini vacation to Santa Cruz.

After our 50K race, we spent two days and two nights in the quaint Nor Cal (surfer slang) surf town of Santa Cruz. We stayed at the lovely and scenic Dream Inn which I must interject is a “boutique hotel” which many of you know I adore.

As we suspected might happen, the PA at the Urgent Care did not give us a good idea of what the problem was. She basically told us that she “didn’t like the look of that purple color under the skin” and the fact that it looks like little burst capillaries. And it could be caused by a virus or it could be caused by something else and essentially we just treat the symptoms.