Confessions of a sick and tired mama

As I sit here trying to force my fever impaired brain into forming coherent thoughts, I am surrounded by a cacophony of coughing! Last week my youngest two boys, Matthew and Ethan came down with high fevers. They changed overnight from normally very active, loud and rambunctious boys into sad little things that cuddled up together on the sofa, or in bed and didn't move all day. Two days later Logan started showing the same signs. So 3 of our four children were miserable, high fevers, body aches, sore throats and coughing. Pretty soon I was feeling poorly as well. We have spent days watching videos, cuddled up in the living room or in bed napping.

Now Claire has it too.

 I took her to the Dr.'s to find out if there was anything I could give her for the coughing, and they ran a test... it came back positive for the flu! Yuck! They did give me a prescription for her to fight the flu, so we stopped by on the way home and picked it up. The doctor warned us that there were quite a few side effects and if we felt that the side effects were not worth it we could simply stop giving her the medicine at any time. (And even knowing that I still blindly trusted and got her the medicine!) I came home (crawled back into my comfy PJ's) and rested for a while, then jumped on the Internet to find out a bit more about the side effects of this medicine. They include the following:

• rashes
• dizziness
• vomiting
• diarrhea
• hallucinations
• aggression
• encephalitis
• anger
• insomnia
• nightmares
• delirium
• confusion
• and in Japan, there were 12 deaths in pediatric patients taking this medicine, although the FDA 'can not conclude that there is a causal relationship between this medicine and the reported pediatric deaths.' (* note, well it must be OK, right??? After all the FDA still says it's fine to give to children over 12 months in age in our country, and they wouldn't lie to us would they?! )

So yeah, we did NOT give any of the medicine to Claire! I am just treating her fevers when they get really high and trying to keep her hydrated and comfortable as possible. The same as I have been doing for the rest of us.

As for everything else... I am just ignoring all of the housework, since I barely have the energy to get out of bed and to the kitchen to make sure we have food or warm drinks during the day! Possibly even worse than letting the housework go to pot was this: one day we actually had ramen noodles for lunch! I just couldn't muster the energy to do more than boil water. Normally I shun anything not cooked from scratch from real whole food ingredients... but I have been wiped out!

 Rodrigo was off yesterday from work and did all of the cooking for us then, and made tons of herbal tea for the rest of us, he still feels fine! But yesterday was his only day off, and he went back today... so chores are pretty much shot right now! We are making sure the animals get fed and watered, and after that everything else will get dealt with later. Laundry is piling up around our ears, and the floor really needs to be swept and mopped, but those things are just going to have to wait!

I had big plans for a couple of fun projects I was going to post about this week. One of them would have been our homemade valentine cards for a swap the kids are part of... but as of yet those are still just a concept in my head! Hopefully next week, once we feel better, we will get caught up on everything and I'll have a few fun things to share with you then!