The family cold strikes again...redux

I mentioned in my last post that, being a newbie at this, I had accidentally deleted my first full-length post.  So now I am trying to recreate it in the light of day, two cups of coffee strong…and without cough medicine on board. 

I had wanted to contribute to this blog with the best of intentions: to join a great group of Boston mamas in chronicling life with the young kiddos.  We had our second child this past May, and it has been a year of transition—I thought, hey I’d love to write about my experiences as a WAHM, my thoughts about raising biracial children in an urban setting, my take on the latest parenting controversies (WSJ articles about the tiger mom and raising kids a la francaise), share a delicious-nutritious-fast-easy recipe.   The idea of being part of a progressive, thoughtful parenting community appealed to me. The suggested half-hour to one-hour commitment to writing a week didn’t seem daunting.

That is of course, until my son curled up like a ball in my lap two weeks ago, sick as a dog with fever.  That fever morphed into the worst cold ever.  For everybody.  Our nine-month old daughter had these cute but sad crustaches when she woke up every morning.  Our nanny caught it.  My husband got it. Even our nanny’s husband got it. And then I caught it.

Fast-forward two weeks, and I am still nursing that cold.  Just went to the pharmacy this morning to pick up more cough syrup.  I’ve gone through the distinct phases—the head cold to beat the band, the bone-crushing fatigue, and now the incessant cough. I’ve crawled into bed many a night at 830pm, exhausted from the day. I have reinvented the term polypharmacy—just look at our bathroom shelf! Ibuprophen, decongestant, nasal spray…if it is nursing-friendly, I have taken it.

Mostly though, I am one grumpy mama.  Nursing two sick kids (literally and figuratively) while you are sick yourself is no one’s idea of fun.  My poor husband has tried to help—soup and medicine runs included—but he’s had to work over last weekend and this week go on a business trip, all while nursing his own cold.  So we’ve limped along.

But I do not mean to whine.  I knew raising kids would be a lot of work, blah blah blah.  I knew there would be weeks like these. But when I signed up to be a mama, somehow no one told me in the instruction manual that:

1) I would wake up every morning at sunrise for the foreseeable future—well, at least until our children graduate to teenage years, and

2) Someone in our house would ALWAYS be sick.  And the corollary: that I would spend a lot of time for the rest of my life at the doctor’s office or at the pharmacy…or be the taker or pusher of a variety of medications, antibiotics etc.

Well, I have resigned myself to my fate.  This won’t be the first or last cold.  Or even the worst—for us, the worst so far was the first cold my daughter caught this summer at the tender age of two weeks, landing us in the hospital for a week with RSV bronchiolitis (just me, my daughter, and a room with a view of the Charles at MGH). So I count our blessings. We are on the mend.  Things could always be worse, I tell myself.  But now I am stocked up and ready for anything. And as I signed off on my first abbreviated post, bring it on!