Home School Curriculum Experts

One child sick and asleep on the couch in my room; another sick and crying on the couch in the playroom; one recovering from sickness and finally back in his own bed after six days; another in mid-recovery but with a cough that keeps her up all night, and still another waiting in the wings, knowing that the specter of illness is hovering over her. Ah, this is one of the hardships of motherhood. The child crying on the couch “Oh, mommy…oh, mommy” because the medicine is not bringing down her fever…it is breaking my heart because I can’t do a thing except hold her. And I feel guilty…should I have taken her to that Girl Scout outing? I suspected she might be getting sick, but she so much wanted to go. And now, hours later, she is tossing and moaning.
Even Daddy is being called into service. He was going from child to child taking temperatures (only rinsing the thermometer in between – WHAT?? He says “What does it matter – they are all sick anyway?”) And so the vigil continues. I have not slept through the night in almost a week – always someone coming to my bed hot, coughing, crying…I feel like they are newborns again with all this waking. And routines – what are those? Television all day for the sick ones, and school doesn’t happen so well for the others. Some have missed co-op, some a sleep-over, and tomorrow church and a fall festival…small things in my mind compared to their sickness, but big in theirs.

I wonder idly as I am up during the night - how many people have we infected this week? All the neighbor kids have been over, we have been to the park, to the store, to church, the library, a ballgame, play practice, Girl Scouts….each of these just hours before someone got sick. And then I fret...is this the swine flu? Normally I am at least a reasonable human being, if not an under-reactor on the sickness front; but I am hyper-vigilant these days. I don’t usually take my kids to the doctor unless I know the doctor can do something for them, but if you wait too long with the flu, they can’t do anything. So I weigh whether it is worth it to make the drive and pay the copay and get a sick child out. And then what if I wait too long? Advil or Tylenol…am I supposed to rotate? If I give them medicine, they feel artificially better and then they try to do too much, but if I don’t they are miserable…what should I do? Does that cough sound like her cold-induced asthma is kicking in? Where is that old inhaler we used to have? If they are chilling from the fever, do I cover them to keep them warm, or uncover them so the fever won’t go higher? Do I feed them, or only give fluids? Why does that one throw up, and no one else does – is it some other sickness they have? Are they still contagious if their fever is gone but they still have the croupy cough? All these questions spin through my sleep-deprived head.

One thing I do know – *I* can’t get sick. I don’t have time in my schedule and besides, who would take care of everybody else? So I just medicate, and hold, and rock, and pray, and know that this will not last forever.