What a bad combination. Dust, noise, confusion, power tools, croup, asthma, fevers…
At times I have been forced to ask myself an uncomfortable question: If my children are the devil's spawn, what does that make me?
Isaac is especially bad when sick. I think it's an off-shoot of the phenomenon in which the more tired he gets, the faster he runs in circles. When he's sick he's so tired that he has to leap from chair to couch, sneak away and eat horrible little red candies that we have to decorate cookies. (Usually these are in the way back of a top shelf, but since everything is upside down in boxes, they are in plain view.) He has to get mouthy and rude and physically uncontrollable.
When I'm sick, too, it's all the harder to cope with psycho boy.
Elias, for his part, has been more a traditional sick person, i.e., subdued. A couple nights ago he scared me half to death with serious breathing problems. He was struggling over each breath, grunting to exhale, and getting pale gray or even almost blue around his mouth. The cure for this is cold air, which was plentiful outside. So I sat with him bundled in my lap, only his little face showing, in a chair positioned right next to an open window. He was burning up with fever and so his cheeks were aflame, his little chest rattling. (Was pneumonia setting in??!) But then, as I determined that he would have to go to the emergency room, and began formulating the steps, it passed. His breathing evened out and his gray overtone went away. He slept badly, though, and we had to do this drill a few more times. Exhausting for all!! So I took him to the doctor yesterday and got the diagnosis I expected: croup. The treatment for that horrible condition is just steroids to take the swelling down. He slept beautifully last night and refused to get up this morning for school.
Isaac has been blighted by this wracking cough that looks to me like it plans to stay until spring. This morning I tried to get him up for school too, meeting strong resistance. And since Elias was sound asleep and seemed desperately to need it, I couldn't feature dragging them both out into the cold to go to school. This wouldn't even have been a question were it not for the difficulty of being HERE. And the difficulty of containing them both in any building all day, let alone one as screwed up as this one.
It's only 10:00 a.m. …