Sick, sick, sick

Well,once again I have been a slacker. I was really sick before Christmas with some osrt of allergy/sinus thing. I lost my voice and it took me three weeks to get back to normalcy. So, here I am feeling great, and Silas comes home from work with something. He got over it, but in the meantime I have managed to catch it and have been hoarse once again for the past week. No fun for someone who likes to talk. LOL I miss my voice...well, not so much the voice, but the knowledge that my voicebox is going to definitely work when I try to speak.

Jacob has had an off and on cough. Aside from that and his extremely touchy and grouchy attitude, you wouldn't necessarily know that he was ill. Joshua was coughing a lot last night, but he woke up this morning exclaiming, "I feel better, Mommy!", so hopefully that is as bad as it gets for him. Elena has had a VERY runny nose for the past two days, but that's it for her. Cassie, poor dear, has been the worst of them all. She was an angel on Wednesday for my mom, so I asked her if she would like to go with me when I went shopping later that evening (which I will tell you about in my next entry). She was very excited and was a big helper, holding my coupons for me and putting things into the cart. We got home and she wanted to go to bed. We got her ready and she zonked out immediately, but an hour later she woke up with the croup.

All of my kids except for Elena have had the croup at some point. I usually don't get uptight about it. I usually go in the bathroom with them and run the shower with the hottest water I can and steam up the room for a while as I read to them. This didn't work for Cassie this time. So I wrapped her in a blanket and went outside in the chilly air with her. Didn't work. Silas was holding her while I looked to see if there was anything in the medicine cabinet to help her a little bit. While doing that, I got a bit nervous. Every single time she would breathe, both in and out, it sounded horrible. I have never had any of the other kids sound like this. So I grabbed our nebulizer and gave her a breathing treatment, which only upset her more, which led to screaming from her, which led to worse crying and worse coughing, etc. You get the picture. I had Silas put on a movie for her and then go up to the store to grab some Sprite and called my mom to see if she knew of anything else I could do for her. While on the phone, Cassie settled down enough to where her breathing became normal again. Whew! So, for two nights I slept on one couch, and Cassie was on the other. She's fine now, but I am still trying to recoop from the lack of sleep.