The Sick Locker

Sick, and yet still cute. Only kids can manage this. This was after a fever broke during nap.

"Man plans. God laughs." ---Yiddish Proverb

Touché , Jewish folk...touché. 

I did indeed have large plans for blogging and life-ing but we got a visit from our old foe, RSV, and we have been shut inside the sick locker ever since. 

I hate the sick locker. We use the word "hate" a lot in our culture...you know, we hate Ke$ha, we hate idiots that write condescending articles about moms with iPhones, we hate the word "moist"...or maybe only I say I hate those things? However, I actually really do HATE being in isolation with sick kids. 

And I am not talking about a runny nose and a slight cough. That's what I like to refer to as "winter" and since it lasts an ungodly amount of time here you just learn to buy the industrial size of Boogie Wipes and move on with life as usual. 

I just told him that Puxatawney Phil was a false prophet and that winter would last sixteen more weeks.

 I might have mentioned a time or ten that winter decided to stick around.  This is from my friend Catherine's FB profile, and it's too good not to share.

Even the natives have dropped their usual scoffing at the soft "cake eaters" in moderate climes and are now restlessly eyeing the forecast

 An extension of winter means an extension of "winter illness" season. So two weeks ago, Addie went to bed perfectly happy and then woke up at midnight choking and unable to breathe properly due to a nasty attack of croup. An ER visit for an emergency nebulizer and some steroids fixed her right up, but she was quite unwell for several days after that with persistent fevers and a nasty cough and a general malaise which she explained as "Mom, I'm getting really slow."

Asking to go to bed at 7 PM one night.

 During a follow up visit to family practice, they mentioned that her croup might have been caused by RSV, which actually relieved me. Because you know, Graydon already had that as an infant so I thought he'd sail right past it.

Stupidly, I forgot that Addie also already had RSV, which is why Graydon got it as a three week old.

As soon as Addie started to recover, G man went down and he did not fare so well. Addie is robust. She gets sick very rarely and when she does get sick, she doesn't stay down for long. I'm not going to get into the whole saga, because he's fine now, but it took us a few doctor's visits and worried nights and a set of chest x rays and some antibiotics and a home inhaler to get over it.  And that's the short version.

We  had the humidifiers on blast in the kids rooms.

Frankly, it really sucked. It's hard to see your kids suffering, even when you have confidence that all will be well in the end. But when your kids are that ill, you can't see anyone, you can't go anywhere, and you can't really DO anything to take their minds off of how bad they feel.  There were a great many sleepless nights especially when Graydon was sick. I slept upright with Graydon on the couch for several nights with the humidifier beside us and I had a lot of uneasy dreams about being on a lifeboat in the ocean. All of which makes sense when you consider that I usually woke up to find water beaded up on the couch and our blankets. 

Poor little G man was not feeling so super at this point.

Long story short, it was tiring and scary at times, but I think we are now healthy and caught up on sleep. We have been released from the isolation of the sick locker and it's amazing. Just being able to run errands during the day feels like a privilege. And you know what? It IS a privilege. Too often I forget that for a lot of people, the sick locker has to become a way of life.

Resting together

So I am newly grateful for health and wellness and energy and rest. 

And, as an added bonus, the weather has been really nice the past few days. Granted, it is supposed to be quite chilly again for the forecastable future, but we do have flowers springing up in our yard.

Spring is about to break out of the sick locker too, and not a moment too soon. I think everyone is ready to welcome a new season.  

Well. We're Back.

Fair warning: I'm going to complain here first. And then I'll move on. It's called "venting" and I heard about it on Oprah. I think that means it's healthy.


1) It snowed here last week. It didn't stick, but STILL.

2) HIGHS are in the 30s this week.

3) It's April. Just a reminder. I'm talking to you, GOD.

4) We are all afflicted by winter icks: nasty colds, some sort of allergies, something that involves streaming noses and bad tempers.

5) The snow still piled up on the ground is nasty sludgy gray. To match the sky. And there are a lot of things wrong in those sentences.


We're back. In winter. (Sidenote: I realize Hell is traditionally thought of as hot, but I'm going with cold. My Hell is cold.)

I am yo-yoing between elation and despair at being back. And while despair has temporarily taken over the driver's seat, there is some elation present sometimes. Just not when I look at Weatherspark and see that the high Thursday is 35. The good news is that it will be nearly 60 today. And also pouring down rain.

OK, moving on.

So yes, it is lovely to be back in our house. I forgot a lot of things very quickly. How the light looks streaming across our kitchen table. How nice it is to have a fully stocked kitchen. How cold the toilet seat is on my rear end.

It is honestly kind of surreal coming back here. We left, for a decent period of time, and now we're back to the exact same life, but as slightly different people who happen to be more freckled tanner and more fit and more relaxed than we were when we left.  It's a good feeling, mostly, but a little disconcerting at times. I sort of understand how the Pevensie kids felt after they came back through the Wardrobe in the The Lion, the Witch, and (the aforementioned) the Wardrobe. Kind of like ..."Hey people, there is this amazing place where husbands are home for dinner, and your nose hairs don't freeze when you walk outside, and the trees talk not far from here."

Our Internet has been down canceled by my hubs before we left in a fit of pique and then forgotten about until we returned and it has taken some time to get that sorted out. And I cannot ...truly cannot...blog on my Kindle or the Ipad. I say way too much for hunt and peck. That way lies insanity and carpal tunnel.

But we are now back online and mostly unpacked and mostly done with rapturous greetings of old friends and now mostly ready to start blogging again. My readers ..the tens of you....mostly composed of grandparents and sisters...have been clamoring for more. And my last post boldly proclaimed my intention to write twice a week. Just in time for me to pack up and ship out and live in transit and yeah, that wasn't all that well timed.

But here we are. We're back, for better or worse, for colder or warmer, and for the next year and three months. Time to layer up, sack up, and do this thing right.