The Revolving Door of Sickness

Ayden's first day of school was somewhere around the middle of August. Since then, some combination of the four of us have been sick. In case you need to be reminded, today is the last day of September, a month and a half after that first day of school. Right now, Allison, Ayden, and Brogan are all coughing. The boys' noses run on occasion. And Allison is making her second trip to the doctor this morning. (On top of everything else, she has an ear infection.) If I had a dollar for every time one of us has sneezed, I'd be able to afford the bigger house we so desperately need. Fun, huh?

Not exactly. All of us have been quite miserable at least one time over the last six weeks. I've been very fortunate in that I've only hit that stage once. The others have not been so lucky. While none of us have had anything major (we're basically running a swap meet for colds), it's been pretty much constant, especially for Allison and Brogan. Adding insult to injury, we can't give Brogan anything because he's too young and Allison's options are overly limited because she's still breastfeeding.

I know, I know. All of this is something most of you with kids in daycare/school have dealt with, but it's new for us. Ayden got two colds while we were still in solitary confinement. That's it. Thanks to his big brother, Brogan has had at least that many in the last month. Brogan has actually handled it all quite well. He's his usual happy self, just with some coughing and sneezing added in for variety. Ayden, however, doesn't handle those things as well, so we've had to do quite a bit of cleaning up after his "incidents." As you might guess, that's not very conducive to making progress with eating.

The irony of all of this is that after 2+ years of having to cancel plans because somebody else has been sick, we've been the ones having to tell our friends how sick we are so they can make the decision to (justifiably) stay away. We're not supposed to be in isolation anymore. We're supposed to be out in the world, doing stuff. (I have quite the way with words, don't I?) This is part of living in the real world, I guess. That doesn't mean we have to like it.