This is how they kill you

Inch by inch, night by night, they kill you.

First, B gets sick and spends an hour screaming even with Motrin in his system and everything you can think of to do does nothing. Three days later as your throat is progressively getting more scratchy yourself A has her night before her first day of being sick. I don't know why her night before is worse than her nights during, but there it is. Every hour or two she wakes up moaning and crying like she's lost her puppy. The first few times you check on her, she's satisfied with a pat and a tuck in. Perhaps you give her some Motrin because it's pretty predictable that her throat hurts like yours does. By 3 am you give up and lay in bed listening to your daughter moan and sob and whimper and cry. Every hour.

Then you have to wake up and make it through a day full of appointments and errands and at nap time you are too congested and sore throated to nap yourself. But you make it through that day.

Then it's J's turn that night. By mid afternoon he's pulling on his already previously infected ear that should be mostly healed by now. The doctor tells you it's likely he got a second infection due to the cold and needs to come in tomorrow because it's going to be resistant to the current course of antibiotics. So you head to bed and starting at 11, he's up every hour hollering and crying. Oh yes, they all cry differently. Different heartstrings to pull at you know. Different types of misery.

Every hour, maybe hour and a half he's up yelling and whimpering. You know that trying to give him Motrin at night is like trying to medicate a greased weasel so you whip out the ear numbing drops the dr gave you last week and squeeze some in to both ears. For an hour and half you think you've solved the problem. Until he's crying again. At the 2 hour mark you can give him more drops. Doesn't work.

At 6 am you know you're dead. Today you have a dentist appointment, music class, no afternoon help, crazy mom coming over to visit and you have to find a way to get J to the doctor to check his ear and then likely get to the pharmacy to get meds for him too.

This is how they kill you. Because you haven't yet recovered from the three colds they had a week and a half ago. And before that there was only a day between the cold they had before that one. And you can only pray they don't catch a 4th cold right after this one because you might just hunt yourself down something so bad for pregnant women to catch that you end up in the hospital for a few days of someone taking care of you. Anyone got some swine flu?