I'll give you a topic...

...and you can talk amongst yourselves.

"Why do children get sick on Friday nights?"

This question goes hand in hand with, "How come the stomach flu hits children at 2am?"

Which might beget the question, "How much medicine is appropriate to bring on vacation?"

Not kidding when I tell you that DD1 has a knack for getting sick on Friday nights, and that vacations bring out the sickness in her. She has had two throat cultures at that Little Clinic (up at King Soopers) on Saturdays - yes, they worked... she had strep, and two years ago had to take her to a clinic at Walmart on the Saturday before Easter because she came down with a raging ear infection. (The child who NEVER gets an ear infection!) Once in Atlanta she got a stomach virus and threw up 27 times in 24 hours. (Had we been here I would have had her hospitalized for dehydration.) The child came down with a HORRIBLE cough on the second night of a two night trip with her Brownie Troop last Spring - and the mothers there called me about what could they give her? (Her entire cabin lost sleep that night.)

Why am I bringing this up now?

We are leaving for our WDW vacation on Monday morning. Cue DD1 coming down with the flu on FRIDAY NIGHT. I could have put money on it. She's off of school all of Friday. (side note: we aren't able to do anything fun because my car decided that it needed to have some expensive repairs done NOW and it took two days to be fixed.) She wasn't feeling punk until that afternoon. Late that afternoon. Certainly too late for me to process, "Oh, perhaps I'd better run her to the peds office for a quick check to make sure we're not dealing with anything awful." Directly before dinner she gets her fever. The peds office is now closed until after we are to depart on Monday.

Great.

Turns out we don't know FOR SURE if she has the flu. The urgent care clinics are swamped today, but the nurse at Children's hospital (don't you love that Children's has a concerned parent line) said they were seeing all kinds of the illness I had described, and it's most likely Type A or Swine flu - they're different. Good news? The flu they are seeing lasts 3-5 days and is only dangerous if patients are having difficulty breathing. Does my daughter have any breathing difficulty? "No." Well, they say, you can call your pediatrician to see if they'll prescribe anything like Tamiflu, but we won't prescribe it through the hospital unless the child is hospitalized. OK, I'll call the on-call pediatrician.

Now, I should probably mention that we picked our pediatric practice before DD1 was born - and really liked this one because they have an integrated health care philosophy. (Husband in particular liked this.) They are proponents of using homeopathic supports in combination with western medicine. I wasn't surprised that the on-call doctor wouldn't give us a tamiflu script - disappointed but not surprised. His reasoning was that there is now a shortage as it's been prescribed for entire families at a time (which- incidentally - is exactly what I was wanting), and this particular flu seems to be short enough in duration that the effectiveness is in question. (Still, would like to have it in my hot little hands... but I had known before I spoke to him that I wouldn't be getting any. Or, I would have started there!)

Husband is out getting Echinacea, Vitamin C, Zinc, and BHI Inflammation. I'm also taking Motrin, mucinex, delsym, benedryl, ocean spray and vicks vapo rub with us.

I'm not worried about getting the flu. If I get it Husband can take the girls to the parks. I'm not worried about our activity level, as we have 6 1/2 days in the parks and we can take it slow if we need to. I'm worried about two things: 1) DD2 getting it and 2) DD1 being run down and getting a different seasonal virus from the airplane air.

It is what it is. As of right now we're not cancelling our trip.
If she's worse tomorrow we'll re-evaluate.

Cross your fingers, send good thoughts... all prayers are appreciated.
Mom? Are you listening?

SMA Friday - they're back!

Can't tell you when my last SMA Friday post was.... well I CAN, but I'm not going to. To make up for it, here are a couple different faces of Hugh. Sigh.

Thumbs up for a Happy Hugh:

This next Hugh is what I picture he looks like when his mother-in-law is talking:

Hugh about to profess his love and/or anxiety... but looking totally cute while doing so:

FBI Hugh, it would have come in handy to have him in our neck of the woods last week:

Wordless Wednesday

(I haven't posted a wordless wednesday in a while but my friend, Laurie, sent this to me and I have to share!)

Blogging my strange stats

So, every once in a while I take a look at my stats. My really great stat counter is no longer working (nope, don't even care why... I'll find a new one someday), but I have a feedjit counter attached here. Feedjit is an overview - I can't drill down any information... not that I'd need to when you see what it told me.

In two hours I got 50 hits. From 14 different countries. Which sounds impressive until you look and see that 48 of those hits were on that stupid entry from May 22nd that had a picture of the SMA and his wife.

FORTY EIGHT out of 50.

Two people in the last two hours came to see me at my blog. The other 48 were looking for Hugh and his wife.

Such a strange thing, if you ask me.

The Disneyland Fund

Behold - The Disneyland Fund.

It wasn't always the Disneyland Fund. For a while - when we were first married - it was "the change bottle", then it was lovingly referred to as "The DD's college fund"... but after the kids started taking an interest in dumping mom and (mostly) dad's change in there we started calling it "The Disneyland Fund."

I was sure we'd take the kids to Disneyland before we took them to Walt Disney World, but after the state of California came after Husband for $9000.00 in taxes that he didn't owe, from a time he didn't live there, all tourist money that might have been directed towards CA got channeled towards FL. The name stuck though... it was The Disneyland Fund.

The Disneyland Fund. Money we've been saving for souvenirs and extra spending money at Disney World. Not money for the actual trip costs, not hotel or airfare. Extra. Fun money!

If you've been to our house you've seen it. You may have had to help me move it, you might have tripped over it, or your kids might have thrown stuff in there. It has been emptied out to clean it out once before (as we were afraid the cheddar bunnies that ended up in there might attract bugs), which gave me daughters quite a bit of pleasure looking through all the coins as they put them back in. You'll notice that there is a lottery ticket in there, courtesy of a very young DD1 who decided - when given a choice of getting another lottery ticket or saving the two dollars in the Disneyland Fund - decided to save. We woke up the next morning to the ticket torn apart and placed lovingly in the bottle. The paper money is courtesy of Grandma and Peepaw, who were as excited as our kids about our someday having a family vacation to Disney. The change is from when Husband emptied out the tray in his car, or I emptied out the spilled change when I switched purses. It was just "extra".

We emptied the Disneyland fund today, and Husband took it to the bank with his two Darling Daughters. They called me with the total.

Take a look again at the picture. Keeping in mind that it's a glass water cooler bottle (big and heavy), how much would you say is in there?

My guess was a couple of hundred dollars, Husband guessed between $400 and $500.

So, what's your guess?

I'm leaving the amount in the comments.

All I can say is DISNEY WORLD HERE WE COME! (Nine days.)

Holy Cow!

Has it been almost a month since I've blogged? I don't know if I've ever gone that long. I haven't even been keeping up with SMA Fridays... so I'm going to have to find a lot of Hugh pictures to make up for it!

I suppose there hasn't been a lot to blog about. I've been updating "my selective reality" regarding design star, but I wonder what's been happening overe here that I can talk about?

DD1 and DD2 are in school. 4th grade is getting tougher, and 1st grade is the most wonderful place DD2 has ever been. She's making new friends, having a blast - and she is reading much better than we knew she could. They're both doing great in math (DD1 is working on square roots this week, and "everyday math" is finally beginning to be recognizable as MATH to me now), and our annual book fair "Dads and Donuts" is tomorrow morning. Where I tell them they can each get 2 books, and they talk dad in to many more. Every year they laugh as they tell me how they snuck one past me!

In eleven days we are leaving for our first family trip to Walt Disney World. We'll be there Monday to Monday - and I think Husband and I are as excited as the kids.

The flooring is going in slowly but surely. Husband now has it figured out, but has been slowed down by a long upper respiratory virus, a hectic workload, and a bout of the flu. (Which DD1 also had. Pretty bad stuff - but over fairly quickly.) The rest of the house? Not coming along at all - which is my fault!

Sadly, this pretty much catches us up. I'm sure I'll have lots to tell you when we get back from Disney!!!!!! Tune in tomorrow when I get back to SMA Friday! Not much longer until we have a new SMA, and who knows if I'll find him blog worthy?