Fever Fun

Mostly we were sick this week: our third distinct illness in three weeks. I hardly even know where we could have picked up the last two illnesses since by then we've hardly left the house due to being sick! My fatigue at what three little children cause in a home (sleepless nights, crying baby who won't be set down all day, extra laundry, general unhappiness) has really brought me to my knees this several weeks with some pretty wild desperate thoughts in the middle of the night (you know, like when I was literally on the sixteenth waking from sick kids)! Just a good reminder of how small and weak I really am under the slightest strain. How tortured martyrs managed to remain strong is beyond me.

This week's illness presented with a fever that came and went with the hours in a pattern for each of the children: about 102 for a day and half, peaking at 104 on the afternoon of the second day, then lower again for the third day and gone. The only other symptom was a sore throat. So just as I considered taking them in to be tested for strep throat, they'd be over it. Mary above looking grumpy with her 104-fever.

John kept asking me for food, but then would fall asleep and not eat it, sleeping for about an entire night and day straight.

Since each child became sick after the next, we were pretty much down for the count for six days straight. I reflected on the changing nature of being a mother of sick ones: When I had one child, if he were sick, I doted on him all day. When I had two, they were rarely sick simultaneously because one would get it after the other, so I could still mostly dote on the one sick child. I think this might have been the first sick-in-bed illness where I had overlapping sick kids for certain days. I found I couldn't give nearly the same attention, so I'd meet the basic needs of the child lying on the couch (food, water, temperature, medicine, television) and bustle off to keep the healthy child from climbing the walls and to carry the sick wailing baby on my back, and so forth. I felt like such a bad caretaker until I had to realize that I was caring for more than one now, and that made me wonder just how hard it is when I hear my mother-friends tell me six or eight or ten of their kids are sick at once!

Anyhoo, in one of the breaks from John's fever on Day 3, he asked to do some more math from his new math curriculum. He was introduced to the abacus and we played a game in which he paired cards that make up 10 (e.g., 6 and 4, but also 4 and 6). It was really fun and John is enjoying math so much these days! He also graduated to another reader since we've finished the BOB book Series 1 and 2, but he's not yet ready for 3.

Mary at three years and four months has taken to drawing some very detailed pieces, such as the above. They delight me.

I got to sneak out to tend the spring garden only a few short times this week, sometimes leaving a feverish, sleeping child on the sofa and taking two well children with me. After a few years of wanting a cheerful Carolina jessamine, I planted two of them along the fence at the top of our driveway: I think it will be so pretty when the tangling yellow vines take over the fence!

We found a baby snake! While planting the Carolina jessamine, I kept finding big fat worms, which I'd toss into our raised vegetable garden beds to make the soil even happier. Then I saw a long one wriggling and picked it up only to discover that it was a tiny snake! It had a black back and a pink stomach and was the size of a large earthworm.

Some of the vegetable seedlings popped up out of the earth!

Pulling Margaret around in the wagon while I hauled rocks gave me fond (and far distant) memories of my dad pushing me in the wheelbarrow under the hot California sun while he did work in his extensive garden.

I planted creeping phlox where we tore out the over sized shrub along the walkway to the side entrance. The three phlox should fill in that ground area and spill down the little hill I mounded and down the rocks (which were scattered at random around our back yard): you can see the effect I am going for by clicking here.

Meanwhile this week, Margaret is looking such the toddler, I am mourning my baby a bit! I caught her at the above moment, walking around everywhere as she does now (no crawling for her!), wearing shoes, wearing a dress, her hair growing thicker. Babies grow up so quickly!

I pull Margaret away from the (ungated) stairs many times per day. She's very good at ascending stairs, but I'm still not comfortable letting an 11-month-old go up without me escorting her. But one time I didn't notice her and she made it to the top safely without me behind her! And one morning I noticed her walking up the stairs while carrying a basket. I was so curious to see if she could do it that I followed behind her for safety and, yes indeedy, she can walk the stairs while carrying a basket!