Life Goes On

Think your life is impossible? Everyone does. Right now, I do.

When I left for a board meeting and planning session last night, my twelve month old had a low grade fever and had thrown up once. I blamed both on teething. I came home a few hours later to find her passed out on my bed with a raging fever of 104.5 degrees. Why don't men ever take children's temperatures? My husband won't even give them Tylenol or cough syrup; I have to be the one to make these decisions, and if I am not around he figures it can wait. This is a difference caused by upbringing--he grew up in a comfortable Italian-American family with access to health care, while I grew up with relatives from the third world who freaked out about fevers because they have seen too many infants die for lack of Tylenol and routine immunizations.

I tend to freak out about illnesses, and this is complicated by the fact that it takes several weeks of dogged calling to get an appointment with my doctor. I'm not one to run to the doctor, but I like having the option should the need arise. Thanks to some interesting scheduling policies at Central Washington Family Medicine, I need to decide on Monday morning if my child will need to see a doctor *next week* and even then, they may just tell me to call back next Monday after I have spent the whole twenty minutes of Elmo's World (my only time to get anything done) on hold. But I digress.

I can't just go to sleep when my children are ill, after all they aren't going to cease to be ill at night (and I've heard too many stories about that little cousin who went to bed with a teething fever and never woke up... thanks, family). So, I slept in my clothes, if you can call it sleeping, both of us on top of the covers because I didn't want to fall totally and comfortably asleep, and she didn't need any extra warmth. Thanks to Tylenol and cold, wet cloths on her head and neck, she never went over 104, although she never went under 102 either.

Today I will be cleaning all day because I have in-laws about to converge upon my household, plus I have writing to do. At some point I need to tweak the CAPE homeschooling website like I have been promising to do for months, and I have a newsletter to put out as well. Oh, and there's sick baby to be dealt with, and doctor's office drama to be scripted should I decide to go that route, although right now all signs point to NO.

Happy writing!