Recovery

Although I’m a little terrified of jinxing things, I am thrilled to admit that we are slowly getting back to normal around here. I’ve been back at work this week (admittedly, it’s very part-time for now: I’m teaching one class a day, and normally it’s 3 or 4), and it’s wonderful to be out of the house and feeling productive. Next week, I’m going to aim for 2 classes a day; I have no desire to overdo things and relapse again, as you can see! It will be a long time before I take good health for granted again, whether it’s mine or anyone else’s in the family.

 The kids are all off antibiotics now, and doing well. In fact, Elijah and William are eating, sleeping and talking better than ever before.  Our bedtime routine now consists of a couple of books, then sending the boys off to bed with their stuffed animals (a huge stuffed frog for William, and a “Pingu” penguin doll and a Kermit the Frog figure [dressed as a hockey player; go figure] for Elijah). We say “goodnight”, turn out the lights, and the boys go to sleep. Very little fuss, very little drama – occasionally we hear them chatting in the dark for a couple of minutes, but usually we don’t see or hear from them again until the next morning, when they appear around 7am, rubbing their eyes and smiling. After 3 years of broken sleep and extended bedtimes, all I can say about this is: HALLELUYAH! 

 Charlotte is doing fantastically well in school with reading and math, and seems to have settled in really well in Grade One. She still needs to work on speaking in French more (she tends to answer questions in English, but since she’s in French Immersion, she’s meant to be attempting to speak more French), and she’s a little impulsive in class (the teacher wants to see her raising her hand before she speaks, etc), but overall she’s doing great. She’s very excited for her birthday party in a few weeks, and we have been negotiating details such as: birthday cake vs. cupcakes (I’m pushing cupcakes – they’re so much easier!) and what type of invitations to send out.  I always forget what a big production birthday parties are!  We have a venue (the local YMCA, so the kids can spend half the party in the pool), but we need food, decorations, balloons, cake, goody bags… It’s a good thing I’m not working full-time yet, so I have time to coordinate everything!

 I’ll finish up with this gratuitously cute photo of the day: Here are Charlotte and Elijah, playing at dress-up. Charlie’s a fairy (obviously), while Elijah is the less-obvious “fairy robot”. You’d be surprised how much use we get out of old cereal boxes around here…

Status Update

So, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that (a) I’m feeling better!! Not 100%, but mostly out of bed and able to contribute more to the household. I may go back to work at the end of the week (VERY part-time, to start) and see how it goes… Part (b) of the good news is that we had my father-in-law here for the weekend to help out with the kids, which was very nice. Here’s a video of him in action, very patiently playing with an over-excited trio of grandchildren at our dining room table:

As for the bad news: we have three kids home sick.  They were actually sick last week, but we got the go-ahead to take them back to daycare/school on Friday, since nobody had a fever anymore.  Yesterday afternoon, however, I got an email from the boys’ daycare saying that they’d had several confirmed cases of scarlet fever (!) among the kids there, and the symptoms were similar enough to Eli and William’s that we needed to have them re-examined.  We brought Charlie as well, since she’s still pale and tired, and the doctor pronounced all three kids to be suffering from ear/upper respiratory infections, and prescribed antibiotics for all of them.  At least it’s not scarlet fever (or H1N1), right? They’ll need to stay home today and tomorrow, but they should all be ok to head back to school/daycare on Wednesday.  

Needless to say (although I’ll say it anyway), my husband and I are totally emotionally and physically exhausted by all this medical drama. We keep clinging on to the fact that we are dealing with minor illnesses here, and things could be a lot worse, but after six weeks of me being home with my mysterious mono-esque illness, and a week and a half of sick kids, we are desperately looking for the light at the end of the tunnel.  It doesn’t help that the newspapers are still freaking out about swine flu (and that Charlotte can’t be vaccinated for another couple of weeks); I am starting to feel a Howard Hughes level of paranoia about germs, and am washing my hands way more often than necessary. 

So, bottom line: we are doing fine, we will cope with another few days of kids being home, but we are REALLY looking forward to living our normal, healthy lives again, whenever we manage to get there!

Trick or Treat!

Hallowe’en was almost a week ago, but we’re still up to our ears in candy. The kids went out trick-or-treating with Grandma and their Daddy, and came back with bags stuffed full of delicious loot. Here are our three costumed children: William the cowboy, Elijah the pirate, and Charlie the fairy (with winter boots, naturally):

The boys’ costumes were kept pretty minimal, since they were wearing their winter coats anyway… or that’s our excuse. It rained pretty much all day on Hallowe’en, but luckily the skies cleared at dinner time, so they had a beautiful evening for trick-or-treating.

I didn’t make it out on Hallowe’en, but I orchestrated the pumpkin carving/seed roasting, which was also fun. Here’s Elijah helping to scoop out the seeds and goopy insides from his pumpkin:

After a few spoons of pumpkin innards, Eli got disgusted by the process, and promptly tucked his hands away while we took over the pumpkin-scooping! Here he is with his finished “happy” pumpkin:

William requested an “angry” pumpkin:

And Charlie just wanted her pumpkin to have “more teeth than William’s”:

The kids spent the week passing around a mild fever, with the result that the boys missed 4 days of daycare, and Charlotte was home from school for 2 days.  They passed the time watching lots of movies and annoying each other (and us) as they perked up again. Here’s a quiet moment in front of the TV, with Elijah sitting on Charlie’s lap:

Montreal has just started giving out the H1N1 vaccine to kids under 5, so we’re going to get that done tomorrow… I’m sure the vaccination center will be packed, but the city has implemented a “coupon” system (where families are assigned a time to bring the kids for the vaccine), so hopefully it won’t be too painful of a process. My father-in-law is here for the weekend, so we have help again, which is wonderful. I think I am making progress back to health – I am out of bed a little more, with a bit more stamina.  Hopefully I am on the mend, finally! I have been out of commission for about 5 weeks now… it will be nice when I am back on my feet.