Can I be done having sick kids, please?

I have to laugh at myself. I'm frustrated that my middle child is getting sicker, b/c I'm tired of having sick kids. Having sick kids means I can't take them anywhere that's indoors, and I can't have people come visit, and I'm tired of that. I feel like I've had sick kids for months, though it's only been a couple of weeks.

But really, it's the kids that are sick that are suffering the most! They're sick!BBBBBBB On my birthday, (August 21st, over a month ago), I came down with a flu, and Lily and Charlotte both caught it around the same time but they got over it very quickly, whereas I developed a nasty cough. I'm not kidding when I say nasty, it was so bad I couldn't sleep b/c lying down triggered coughs and I can't sleep sitting up. For two nights in a row the only way I could sleep was on my stomach, and since Charlotte doesn't think she can fall asleep in any way other than nursing, this presented some challenges to our bedtime routine. Tim got less sleep b/c he rocked Charlotte to sleep while I napped on my tummy; I got less sleep b/c I can only sleep so long in one position before I wake up sore, and I couldn't sleep in any other position or I'd cough, so I would just have to sit up until I was exhausted enough to fall asleep again in the same position.

My coughs were so strong that my torso muscles got sore from coughing, and every couple of days during the two weeks of severe coughing I would develop soreness in some new muscle group from coughing in an odd position. For instance, one morning I was lying on my side, and when a coughing fit hit, for some reason I tensed the muscles in my thigh, and that thigh was then sore for two days. I tried herbal teas, I tried hot soup, I even asked for soup when sweet ladies from church asked what they could do (and they delivered, too, which was SOOO nice!). After two and a half weeks, I had had enough and went to the doctor..... who said my cough was only caused by snot dripping down my throat and prescribed a cough medicine that had never been studied in breastfeeding mothers. I was deeply frustrated and a little angry. FINALLY, it was time for us to travel for Tim's convention in California (September 4-6), and as I worked to pack up the house, I started to get better. I researched cough medicine and found a cough suppresent drug that was compatible with breastfeeding and started taking it, and also started using menthol/herb cough drops at night. The first night at Tim's convention was the first night I slept the night through without coughing, and I continued to improve every day.

All this time I was coughing, I was assuming that the cough was just an aftereffect of the flu, and didn't think I was contagious. After Tim's convention, while we were staying in California in preparation for him to fly to China and for me and the kids to visit his sister in Utah, Lily caught the cough! Then Charlotte! So we went to Utah with two coughing girls. Charlotte got over it very quickly, but Lily is still not over it. Then, in Utah, Jack caught it. Lily seems to be getting better, but Jack's cough wakes him up at night, just like it did me. And he's so tired, he's always the first one to bed at night, and there for a few days he was even napping multiple times a day.

So, tonight, Lily vomited. And that was when I said out loud, "Can I be done having sick kids, please?" And then laughed at myself and started to be a little more compassionate for my child who had just puked and felt awful.

So, while everyone has been battling various levels of illness, life has gone on and we've had fun. We were in California for about a week, first at Tim's convention in the middle of nowhere in Marin County (north of San Francisco), then in the San Francisco metropolitan area visiting friends and favorite places. Tim worked during the workdays there, but during the evenings and the one weekend, he spent time with us and we had a great time. We went to the beach, we hiked in the Muir Woods, we visited dear friends that I've really missed (and the kids had a great time playing with their kids), we went to the Palo Alto Junior Museum that Jack has been asking to go to for the last few months, and we went to the park that we used to live near in Palo Alto. Then when Tim went to China, we went to Utah to visit his sister, Jessica, and her daughters, Leslie (almost 5) and Elysia (just turned 2). It was so beautiful to see my kids playing with hers, watching them deepen their bonds, hearing them sing together, and getting to know Jessica better. She is such a faithful and patient woman and I'm so glad I married her brother! Jack and Leslie played pretend games, he introduced her to games and movies on the iPad (which I would have limited much more strictly if he hadn't been so sick and tired), and Lily joined in when she wasn't busy playing by herself. Leslie and Elysia both loved Charlotte, and by the time I'd been there a few days they were pretty gentle with her.

Jack is really honing his math lately. While we were in California, he said "Ten tens is the same as five twenties!" Then in Utah, he said "Four twenties and four fives is a hundred!" When I asked him how he figured that out, he said "Because two twenties and two fives is half a hundred!" (Somehow, "half a hundred" has become absolutely synonymous with "fifty" in Jack's vocabulary.) After we came home, we played Carcassonne, which keeps score with markers on a number line that wraps around and starts over at 50 (so, it runs from 1-49, then if you put your marker back on 0 you pick up a tile with "50" on it and just keep on going). He had his marker on 36 and earned 21 points. I was about to move his marker for him, but I stopped and asked him where his marker would go. He studied the board for a few seconds, then asked me to show him where the 6 was. I showed him, then he put his marker on the 7 and smiled up at me. I asked him how he knew that and he explained that from 36, he would put his marker on the 46, then on the 6, then on the next one after 6. In other words, 21 is made up of 10, 10, and 1.
Here's the thing he's having trouble with: recognizing the numbers 5-9. For some reason, he does this with almost everything academic that he learns: he picks it up from just everyday life, then starts to second-guess and doubt himself and almost completely unlearns it. He used to easily recognize the numbers 1-20, but now he only knows 1-4. He sometimes knows the others at first, but then as soon as he realizes that he just recognized them, he stops saying the number and asks me what number it is. I think that if I stop bragging about his accomplishments so much in his presence, he'll stop feeling so stressed about getting it right.
But even with all this refusing to read the numbers 5-9, he has advanced to being able to read 2-digit numbers; as long as both digits are between 1 and 4 he can read it right off, but if one of the digits is between 5 and 9 he'll ask for the name of that one before he'll tell me what number it is.

It's almost 11pm. Good night!

Jack is a math whiz

Just now, as he was sitting on the potty while I folded laundry nearby, Jack asked "Is twenty twenties something around four hundred?" I told him that it is exactly four hundred, and reminded him that squaring something is multiplying it by itself, just like twenty twenties, so we can say that twenty squared is four hundred. Math comes easily to him, but names take a long time to take root in his mind. I wonder how long it will be before he remembers the concept of squaring.