Ears, Ears, Ears

Poor Limelet.  

He just finished a course of (much-loathed) antibiotics for ear infection a bit over a week ago, and it looks like he has another one already.  This will be the third time since he started day care. He never had them before (though a couple of times his ears were a little iffy, they never actually got to a bad stage).  

He went to his well-baby visit last week, and got his second Hep A (as planned by me) and also a chicken pox vaccination (one of two, which the doc talked my husband into, and I'm still kinda ticked about).  Anyway, four days after the vaxes (Friday night) he came down with a fever and threw up once in the middle of the night.  Of course I was trying to get back to night-weaning that week, so once again I feel like a monster because he was sick.  He was in decent spirits all weekend, at least in the daytime, but had a fever the whole time.  I attributed this to the vaccination reaction, though this may or may not be the case.  Maybe his ears were just getting bad again and caused both the fever and the throwing up; I don't know.  TheLimey is convinced that the vaxes caused it all.

Limelet didn't sleep very well Saturday night (so I slept about 3 hours) and then last night it became obvious that it was his ears again, so in the middle of the night we dragged the blankets and stuff downstairs so I could sleep in the chair with him.  He whimpered and slept only fitfully and intermittently for the remaining few hours (so again, I got about three hours total sleep last night, too).  Once it was daytime, he was cheerful again (if a little fragile and clingy).  He feels okay when upright, basically.  This morning he has an appointment at 10:30 to which TheLimey will take him, since he is still not back to work yet (second interview Wednesday, though!)

We went all out and spoiled him over the weekend, really just to have some way to help him feel less miserable.  It was too cold to go outside, and Limelet was too sick to be around others much, so we were trapped in the house.  I got several "new" videos at the Starvation Army, and on Sunday Daddy broke down and went to Toy-R-Us and got him a little train (the generic version of the wooden Thomas trains) and some new Play-Doh.  Also, we let  him eat whatever he wanted, since his appetite was so down we were happy to have him eat anything at all, even ice cream.

I know that a naturopathic treatment for ear infections is to cut dairy out entirely.  Maybe we will be trying that soon.

When do their ears (internally) change shape enough to grow out of this?