Sick and Tired

It's Saturday morning and it's chilly and raining.  It feels like Fall and I love it.  Tom is golfing in the rain (???) and the girls and I are hanging out in jeans and t-shirts like we weren't just wearing shorts and tanks just yesterday.  Tom just sent me a text from the golf course instructing me to e-mail him a grocery list so he can stop by Kroger on the way home.  Good boy.  Especially since his text started off with "we teed off an hour late".  Good recovery, Tom.  Some days he knows the key to my heart is offering to go to the grocery for me.  I despise the grocery.  So his offer has opened up my whole morning to sip on my DD coffee and cuddle a sick Emily.  College Gameday will be on TV a little later this morning, so Emily is going to get her first lessons in college football if she wants to sit on my lap.  I'm just kidding.  She's sick; I wouldn't force her to sit and watch it if she didn't want to -  I'd give her the iPad or something to do so I could watch it  ;)

She's had 3 days of pre-school and she's already sick.  I have 2 kids with 2 very different immune systems.  Emily has been admitted to the hospital 2 or 3 times with bronchiolitis, has had pneumonia once or twice and gets a new cold about every 4 weeks while school's in session.  Casey has never missed a day of school due to illness. (knock on wood!!!)  When Emily is sick, she doesn't sleep.  And that means I don't sleep either. 

Emily 9 months old at Cincinnat Children's with bronchiolitis

 ......

Yawn.  It's now Sunday morning.  Yesterday just got away from me, but Emily rallied (after a couple doses of Motrin and Popsicles) enough to want to get off the couch and play outside.  It turned out to be a gorgeous day yesterday!!  Despite the lack of sleep, she and Casey played and I tended to some flower beds that needed some attention.  Every once in a while Emily would come up to me and say, "I need you, mommy."  It's her own way of asking me to cuddle to make her feel better.  I'm needed a lot this morning again.  Poor thing.  Last night Tom offered to be on duty with Emily which should have allowed me to rest peacefully, but instead insomnia set in.  The entire night.  Ugh.  At least Emily slept a little better.  But I was restless and awake.  And I found myself thinking back to when she had her spine surgery and the 4 months of sleepless nights we endured and I know this is nothing in comparison. I have started a post recalling that time in our lives, but I know it will be lengthy so it might take me some time to finish it.  For now I'm going to sit and close my eyes while both girls are entertained with construction paper and a roll of tape.  Seriously, their imaginations are going wild with tape and paper.  I love tape and paper.

.......

Oh, I remembered I started writing several days ago...  It's now Tuesday morning and Emily is still sick :(    A trip to the pediatrician yesterday gave us the diagnosis - Hand, Foot and Mouth Virus.  The inside of her mouth is covered with blisters and she cries if she tries to eat or drink anything and has taken to constant mumbling because it hurts to talk.  I've been to the grocery to get jello, pudding, applesauce, popsicles, mashed potatoes, and anything else that might get something other than juice in her stomach.  It's a virus so it just needs to run it's course, along with doses of Tylenol and Advil.  When Casey went to daycare years ago I caught this virus there and it was the worst sore throat and fever of my life.  Little sister has all my sympathy right now.  She'll be home from school at least another day or 2, so we've been chugging juice and watching The Wiggles and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse like it's no body's business in between naps.  She's still not sleeping great and we're both exhausted.

A picture that didn't get deleted - Emily watching a Mickey Mouse marathon this morning.

Today is also September 11.  As I put out the flag on our front porch this morning, I knew Casey would ask me why ours and the ones that are staked in the yards along the main road of our neighborhood are out today.  I will tell her that we hang our flags as a way of remembering those people who were in New York City that day when the buildings fell.  We discussed this day briefly last year and we touched on that bad people did a bad thing that day that made the buildings fall down.  If she asks for more information, I'll tiptoe around it, offering only minimal information to appease the curiosity of a 7 year old.  She doesn't need to look at every airplane and wonder if it will kamikaze into a building or worry her heart knowing that those buildings were filled with the moms and dads of other kids just like her.  I've heard my parents speak of where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot and I know one day I will share with my daughters where I was on September 11, 2001.  I was in a downtown office building in Cincinnati annoyed at the sudden slowness of the which the Internet was working.  My boss' wife called him to tell him she was seeing on TV at home that a plan flew into the World Trade Center and because I speak sarcasm as a second language and couldn't even imagine that someone would do such a thing on purpose, I said something to the effect of "How does that happen?  How do you miss World Trade Center in the window of a cockpit??"  Of course we all know how that day unfolded in all of its tragedy.  And my daughters will never know that once upon a time you didn't have to take your shoes off in an airport and no one considered that a plane full of jet fuel could take down a 100 story building. 

It's now Tuesday afternoon and I'm wondering if I'll ever just get this post over with.  I've just realized that almost every picture I've taken in the last week or so has been deleted from the camera and Casey has just come home from school and says her nose is all stuffed up and her class watched a video about 9/11.  I better get on with the business of my now 2 sick kids, what this school video touched on and if she has any questions.  AND as I'm typing this I've just heard,  "Mommy!! Somehow there is a hole in the wall in the toy room!!"   I'm afraid if this post goes on another day, we will all fall ill and the house might fall apart.   

Here's a picture taken last weekend before the sickness and sleeplessness began.  My sweet little princesses.
(Don't judge us on the Cheetos, Spaghetti O's, beer and Easy Bake oven on the kitchen counter- we must have known a tough week was around the corner :)

 

Taking back my house

 

Now that Emily is at school 4 mornings a week (it's actually just 2-1/2 hours each day so it's sounds like much more time than what it is), I am going to take back my house.  From whom you ask?  My kids.  Or maybe myself.  The answer might be both.  I saw this a while back on Pinterest and it might explain it best:


 I'd like to think we were just too busy doing fun stuff this summer to find the time to clean the house, but that's probably wrong.  It just didn't seem like it was worth the effort.  The only time the house was actually all clean and picked up was when we were all in bed.  I am the kind of person that likes organization and tidiness -  Did you hear that?  that was Tom coughing in the Ah-Hem! way that really means That's A Bunch ofCrap.  Let me finish, Tom.  What I was going to say is I am the kind of person that likes organization and tidiness most of the time.  I just take time off from that in the summer when the girls are home and I cry uncle to the chaos.  But now that they are busy making their teachers' lives miserable (I'm kidding!), I've got a little time to reacquaint my lazy self with my tidy self. 

 

I started today with mopping the floors.  Our carpets look almost new thanks to Tom's hard work this past weekend, so that just made the hard floors look even filthier.  After I mopped the kitchen, I looked at the water I was using for mopping and debated whether to change it already after one room.  Unfortunately I was using a blue bucket and not a grey one so there was no excuse for the water to be that grey and so I had to change it.  Yuck!  Next up was the laundry room/mud room.  I can always gauge when this room needs to be mopped by when I begin to ask myself if the 5 second rule applies to clean socks that are dropped on the floor when I get them out of the dryer. 

 

While I was in that room I finally turned my attention to the lockers I've been ignoring all summer.  Yes, we are fortunate enough to have wood lockers custom built for all 4 of us by my dad.  And while all of you are pinning these fantastic ideas for your mud rooms that look like this:

 

 

 

 

The reality looks more like this (in our house anyway):

 

See the vintage sign near the ceiling in the Pinterest mud room?  We have one, too :)

 

 

The girls use their lockers more as a target of which direction to throw their stuff when they run in from outside instead of actually placing the shoes in the cubbies or hanging their stuff up on the little hooks.  They need to be re-painted, but vacuuming out all the grass and dirt from the back corners helped achieve my goal for today.

 

I've always have a big to-do list when school starts and usually I'm scrambling to finish it days before school ends in May.  But not this year. (I say this every year)   I'm doing some more consulting work which will keep me busy, too, but I will find time to get my projects around here done.  I love the feeling of checking things off lists. 

Oh, and checking things off lists?  Here's one:

 

 

We've taken the gate off the bottom of the stairs.  Emily is getting better at keeping her balance on the steps so we're crossing our fingers on this one.  Keep yours crossed, too - I'd hate to be posting about a broken body party as a result of falling down the stairs!