Plague House

We've been dealing with and fending off various illnesses around here for the last little while. As of today it is officially time to run up the quarantine flag and declare this a plague house. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here ... or better yet stay outside and leave small donations of food at the door.

You may recall, faithful readers, that Emma stayed home from school on Monday with a cold. After that she seemed to bounce back quickly, with only an annoying cough lingering. Speaking of annoying coughs, I've had one since January 13, and it's getting worse instead of better, but as I had no other sick-like symptoms I was able to live with it. Yesterday morning Jason woke up feeling miserable, having obviously caught some bug or other.

Yesterday evening Jason and Emma both went to sleep almost as soon as they got in the house and stayed asleep most of the night. Jason was shot down with flu-like symptoms, and Emma's cold had clearly recurred in a virulent form. I was still coughing, but otherwise OK, till just before bedtime when I started to get all sinus-y and stuffed-up.

By this morning, I felt just as bad as anyone, which was pretty bad. Christopher was the only lively member of the quartet. He recently got over one of those annoying coughs that hung on for weeks, and I am literally praying he doesn't get sick again, although how he would avoid it in this germ-infested atmosphere, I don't know.

If I could wave a magic wand and give myself one parenting quality, I would like to be able to instill (inflict?) in my children the same overdeveloped sense of responsibility my parents gave me, because 90% of the world doesn't appear to have it at all and the world needs the other 10% of us to show up on time. I had promised earlier in the week to have Children's Story at church today, and even though it's one of the easiest things on the church program to replace, even though I was lying there sick in a house of 75% sick people with hard crusty snow in the driveway and He Who Wields the Shovel flat on his back with the flu ... even then, it took me about half an hour to decide that I wasn't going to church today. I had a wonderful feeling of peace and freedom once the decision was made ... after, of course, I called the church to alert the platform chairperson that I wouldn't be there, which is what we responsible people do when we bail on things.

Today has been incredibly low-key, as Emma, Jason and I have stumbled from nap to nap, and Christopher has looked in vain for someone fun to play with. One nice accident of biology is that when I am sick, I tend to feel worse as the day goes on, and when Jason is sick, he tends to feel better as the day goes on, so on those dreaded occasions when both parents are sick, we can each cover half the day. There was a point about two o'clock this afternoon when my downward trajectory passed his upward one, and we smiled at each other and exchanged a few sentences. Then I went barrelling downhill like a skier out of control. Jason is now Parent-in-Charge, and has just shovelled the driveway and is now taking a shower. I'm blogging with my last bit of strength before crawling back into bed.

I leave you with a picture of two usually lively and energetic gals who today are ... not so much lively.