The Great Balancing Act

The One Where I Puke Too

The tummy bugs generally follow 1 of 5 possible pathways around here.

A)  Katie pukes the house down, I bathe in vomit and do 8 loads of laundry cleaning it up.  I have to force her to take a shower because she's covered in vomit.  No one else gets sick.

B)  Katie pukes the house down, I bathe in vomit and do 8 loads of laundry cleaning it up.   I have to force her to take a shower because she's covered in vomit.  Holly catches it and pukes once or twice, always hitting a container unless she happens to start in her bed .  Then it's 50/50.

C)  Holly pukes once or twice making minimal mess.  Holly doesn't sleep, not even when she's sick.  Katie catches it and pukes for days like one possessed.  I bathe in vomit and do 8 loads of laundry cleaning it up.

D)  Maybe I get it, feel dizzy for a day, lay on the couch and whine. Sleeping with one eye open so that nobody burns the place down or eats me.  Please, oh please, can't you see that Momma is SICK.

E) Very, very rare Curtis gets sick -- pukes in bowls, asks for carrots, and naps on the couch telling everyone to be quite.   I tell him to sleep in the bed, the bed, the bed.  I would KILL to be able to sleep in the bed when sick.

We've had something a little different this week.  I woke up Wednesday morning to Holly gagging, I ran down stairs, and back up, she puked in the bowl.  Then I puked cleaning out the bowl.  Turns out we both had it.  Fever, headache, dizzy, a couple of trips to the toilet, laying on the couch whinning, and rice for dinner. Yada, Yada, Yada . .

Yesterday the tummy bugs "jumped out of our mouths and into Katie".  48 hours later she's still going strong.  She refuses to eat or drink, huddles under a blanket, and whines about feeling dizzy.  We once again have conversations about dehydration and lack of food causing the same symptoms as the stomach virus.  The good news is she hasn't puked anywhere inappropriate this time.  Katie is a lazy puker, but  I think I put the fear of God in her last time.  You know, just a little motherly advice that if she ever ran around the house wallowing in her own vomit again, I'd kill her, after I made HER clean it up of course.  I think it was the idea of cleaning it up herself that did it -- it's all about having the proper motivation.

I know, go ahead and say it, we puke more times in a year than you have in a lifetime.  Yada, Yada, Yada.  I guess we're just talented that way.

Another Day, Eight More Loads of Laundry

Holly, vomitting, 6:00 am, all over her bed.  What more can one possibly say?

She does seem to be recovering quickly.  Hopefully no one else will get it -- we have plans next weekend.  Had some minor plans this weekend, but the ship has sailed.

Catching Up Katie

 

It seems that I’ve spent quite a lot of time talking about the weather recently.

We stand surprised here that January is almost done.  I so need to start going through and organizing and purging stuff for the move – it’ll be here before we know it.  We had such a nice, relaxing Christmas Vacation, that we were all a little sluggish heading back into the fray.  We are definitely up and running now though, except the fact that Katie has been down since yesterday with her first stomach virus of 2009.  She woke up in the middle of the night on Tuesday and vomited a mess that took Curtis and me together a bit over an hour to clean up – not counting the 5 loads of laundry, of course.  She was sick all day yesterday, and is still dizzy and nauseated today.  Blankity, blank, blank Tummy Bugs!

Katie’s sickness came on as quite a surprise for us.  She had a really good day Tuesday, and showed not signed of being off her game.  In fact in gymnastics on Tuesday she had a personal best kind of day, and became the first girl in her class to be able to successfully do a hand stand step down on the balance beam without a spotter.  Yikes!  Did you know that thing is only 4 inches wide and is REALLY far off the ground?

In Girl Scouts we have been selling cookie and working on our sewing Try-It this month.  Samoas anyone?  Our troop is almost out of cookies to sell, and the girls almost know how to sew. J  The troop is making Owl Softies.  Katie is doing really well with this particular project – primarily because I tried it out on her a couple of months ago before releasing it on ten 2^nd and 3^rd graders.  The girls are really enjoying it though.  They are learning to sew in preparation for the service project they have chosen to do – making blankets for Project Linus.

Katie is getting really into reading these days.  She is currently into Beverly Cleary, and is reading about a book a week.  She has made it through the entire Ramona Series and most of Henry Higgins.   We just ordered the Ralph S. Mouse books for her from the book fair.  She recognizes that she is running out of Beverly Cleary books and has recently begun to branch out some.  She just read Stewart Little by E. B. White (The last E.B. White she hadn’t read.), and is currently working on When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.  She and three other girls in the neighborhood decided to start their own book club – this is apparently the kind of things girls do with their time at the playground.  They have decided to read two chapters of Jack London’s Call of the Wild a week and meet each Saturday to discuss it.  I think they got this idea because their mothers and teachers talk about the book clubs they are in.

Here’s hoping Katie recovers enough to make her book club meeting this week!  Next weekend she is apperently hosting.

Foiled Again

Curtis is off frolicking in the South of France. Oh, I mean he’s studying things of utmost military and historical significance to develop his professional skills.  I had a half day Girl Scout Leaders training scheduled this morning, so I engaged a baby sitter, got everyone dressed and ready, prepared the day’s morning snack and lunch, and was about to head out the door when Holly started screaming and throwing up.  I sent the baby sitter home again, called up the Girl Scout organizers to tell them I wouldn’t make it, and spent several hours cleaning up after Holly’s tummy bugs.  Argh!

Blankity Blank Tummy Bugs

Katie woke up with a stomach virus yet again yesterday morning.  She is much improved this morning, but still feeling under the weather.  I have been cloroxing the world and holding my breath to see who it strikes next.  The evil tummy bugs just love that child.

And to think, we’d been doing really well on the whole sickness thing since the Mother’s Day strep incident.  Sigh.

It's music to my ears. Not!

I awoke at 4:30 this morning to the musical stylings of Holly puking all over her bed.  Seems she has picked up the tummy bugs, presumably from the toys at the doctors office where we went for pink eye treatment on Thursday.  Ugg!

She did have the energy to peek into her Easter Basket.  She pulled out her new Littlest Pet Shop VIP Kitty and we put the rest of it away.  "Water goes with tummy bugs.", she says.

Seriously, what is the deal with stomach viruses and this community?  My girls get more stuff in a season than they did in a period of 4 years in the states.   I suspect it's because we all go to the same schools and work in the same places so any virus one person in the community gets eventually spreads to all.  If that pandemic flu virus ever comes, we are going to be in serious trouble.  There's no telling yet if she has the stomach virus Katie and I had a month or so ago or if there is a new one going through the community.  I guess we'll find out if Katie starts puking in her bed.

I'll post some more Easter stuff later today.  I have lots of fun pictures of the girls decorating eggs, and Katie has been able to enjoy her basket.  Both girls selected the world's frilliest Easter Dresses, but I doubt Holly will be in the mood to wear hers.

Oh, and for the record, three-year-olds with tummy bugs are very disinclined to cooperate with pink eye drops.

What a week!

We have just completed one dosey of a week here.  Katie's "tummy bugs when out of her mouth and into mine."  (Holly's philosophy of how germs work.)  I was horribly sick with the stomach virus Monday-Friday.  As I am beginning to recover from the stomach scourge, I seem to have acquired Holly's lovely head cold, which also originated with Katie.  Knock on every piece of wood in house, we have thus far managed to keep Holly from acquiring the stomach virus. 

Curtis has been working 18 hour days for weeks -- he hasn't had enough contact with any of us to get any of this stuff.  It looks like he has a regular week ahead of him followed by more long days.

In the midst of all of this, the State of Georgia decided that we owed them $2,608.16 in sales tax for our old Saab from the year 2000.  (We lived in Georgia on non-resident military tax status for all of 5-months in the year 2000.)  Now we owned the Saab for almost 3 years before moving it to Georgia, but some paper pusher in Atlanta decided 8 years later that it somehow fell out of the sky in 2000, and we then bought it illegally from some mystery source in Georgia and didn't pay taxes on it.  [Because we bought the car overseas, the first years of our ownership were recorded in the European system, and we had to title it in Georgia all those years ago when we got it to the states.  At that time, we provided Georgia with all the proper paperwork and they deemed that we didn't own them any sales tax, just buckets of ad valorem (personal property) tax, which we paid at the time. ]  We sold this car over 3 years ago, and just didn't have records going back that far.  Fortunately, our marvelous bank had records of our purchase agreement for the Saab, thus proving that we are exempt from the Georgia tax mafia.  Not that they've completely cleared our name yet, but after hours on the phone (with the stomach scourge) I have convinced them and they say they're working on it.  (Apparently they don't quite know how to delete the charge without receiving the payment.)

Here's to a better week ahead than the one we left behind.

Tummy Bugs

They're b-a-a-a-ck.

The evil tummy bugs with their glowing red eyes struck Katie once again in the middle of the night last night.  We seem to be running  a tummy bug Hilton here.

She appeared at the side of my bed at 3:20 am and said, "Mommy, I feel weird and I think there's throw-up in my bed."  I seem to be destined to never sleep through the night again.

Thus far, Holly shows no sign of infection.  Sometimes she'll escape it (the little darling seem to prefer Katie), but usually it's just that she's waiting for her own 3 am spotlight.