illness - update and more*

We had to put Catherine on a strong antibiotic - 3x a day. All because of some tiny seed hull - the kind you find in seasoning mixes - lodged beneath her gum behind one of her new 6-year molars. She is doing better, now, but hates the taste of the medicine + the medicated oral rinse that I have to irrigate her tooth & gum with.

Teresa still doesn't quite feel well - evident by her decreased appetite - and is slowly recovering from her lake-water induced gastrointestinal illness.

I went out to eat with a friend in Omaha on Wednesday night and got what I'm going to call food poisoning. It could be a pregnancy-induced sensitivity to something I'm not used to, like municipally treated water, but difficult to tell for sure. It is day 3 and I'm hoping that I won't have to call the doctor on Monday.

So, for the last two days, we girls have been laying around the living room - or outside on the porch swing (so the boys can play) with piles of books - and a bit more TV than usual (Curious George on PBS and Dora the Explorer on Netflix).

The house is more than a mess - it is an absolute disaster. These last two days, all I've really been able to do is a few loads of laundry, which are waiting for me in baskets to be put away. Meals have been...not quite up to par. Yesterday morning, I cooked a pot of oatmeal and let the kids serve themselves. They each had a bowl and then ate out of the pot through the rest of the morning. We did the same thing for lunch with a pot of rice, which they picked at until dinnertime, which was a choice of leftovers from earlier in the week plus a bag of frozen veggies. Dishes have been piling up since the chicken & potato crockpot meal I left the family on Wednesday. All the "little" messes that I usually pick up or make sure that the kids pick up have been ignored. The vacuum, broom, toilet brush, and mop have sat, unused, desperately waiting for me to use them.

Recently, my husband and I have been talking about just what it is that I do every day...why the house always seems to be a mess. The blessing of this experience is that it has provided us a visual assessment of just what it is that I do every day...by seeing what happens when it does NOT get done.

*Updated to add that Adam took Anthony fishing this morning - he caught the first fish and had fun fishing with daddy, but threw up in the water twice. He says that his tummy hurts and is now parked on a towel on the couch with a cup of *homemade* Gatorade and watching Maisy.