Cycle

This winter has been so mellow, and yet nothing has been different this year for us. Nothing much going on. It's because of the sick cycle.

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but I get increasingly frustrated with the colder months as January and February roll along--and it's not even been that cold. Nevertheless we get caught in the sick cycle. We try to function normally, attending school and church and grocery shopping. Someone gets sick. We do our duty to society and stay home, cancel our play dates, and try to keep our germs to ourselves (heck, we even stay home from Wal-Mart 95% of the time). We get cabin fever, go stir crazy, and even grouchy. Then we recover and slowly peek our heads out the front door... Cautiously attend church and school again, washing and sanitizing our hands a lot... aaand then someone gets sick and we're knocked back off our feet to start the cycle all over again.

It always finds us.

The last two weeks we started off with "just a cold." Sorry to use the "h" word, but I HATE that phrase. And it morphed into a croup cough in Nathan's lungs--our family's most vulnerable set. After many days of wheezing and coughing, and Albuterol, and almost pulling out the nebulizer for the first time in two years, Peter started to bark. He spent a couple nights in Insta/KidsCare due to wheezing and chest retractions while breathing, etc. etc. Bronchiolitis. The kind where the doc says "Could very well be RSV..." but we don't care about the official diagnosis because it's just viral, and it'll only differ by what we call it, not what we're seeing. Luckily his oxygen saturation/respiratory rates remained stellar, so he just got to go get "suctioned" a couple times to clear the gunk in his airway. He didn't need hospitalization or oxygen like Nate did as a baby. But then it got fun as the older kids had such a hard time with the gunk in their airways that they both spent two nights a piece throwing up through the ugly AM hours of the night.

And just short of two weeks later, we finally feel well enough to start creeping back out into the real world.

Phew. My fingers on the keyboard feel "out of breath" after that story.

But let me not forget to leave out that I, myself, have hardly been sick (knock on wood), and given the strength to get everyone else through these cycles. See? Silver lining!

A picture of the youngest, just because he's growing up the fastest right now.

I'm learning a little more clearly during these cycles that Earth life is not the period for reward. But how we get through matters, so we go through it all. Even young Peter does his best to put on his smile when he feels awful, and I think I can learn a whole lot from that.