Howdy,
Oh, man. Here we go … again.
I wanted to write, Here we go!
Like I had a great topic and was ready to roll, ready to rock this laptop keyboard.
But it’s more like a pedestrian, a defeated, version that’s subdued and simply here we go again, because the kids — our wonderful boys — are sick again.
Not bad yet, but come on.
Jasper has had the cough hanging on, but working through it. Then the nose starts to run a bit more. Not enough to necessarily keep him from school again, but who knows which way it’ll go. Hopefully he stays okay — or more accurately goes the right direction, getting healthier.
The younger two, though, have had the water eyes, runny nose, and low-grade fever today. Hanging in there and having a pretty good attitude. (I was referring to them, not me, but I think I’m doing okay too. It’s been an okay day, and this post is just letting a little bit of the struggle out. We’ll see how far I get. Riah’s seeming a bit less happy at the moment.)
So my main thing right now, I guess, is hoping we don’t cycle through something much worse, or return to being wiped out and in the pediatrician’s offices multiple times in the week, covering all three boys.
Writing that last sentence I realized that basically I’m hoping that on the Hawes health front February doesn’t end the way it began: with high fevers and wiped out boys.
Makes it hard to keep up with stuff, to attend weekly things, when one or all are sick.
Honestly, I don’t feel like we’re all going down in any serious way. It’s just the idea: here we go again!
You sort of get used to it — acclimatized or even desensitized — and it becomes difficult to remember if they’re getting sick again or just hadn’t ever fully kicked whatever they had before. With all the lingering it’s certainly fair to think a child had never not been sick, but it feels more like a cycle — the kind I remember when some bug would work through my childhood family, one of four brothers catching something that then worked through each at a time and seemingly back to the first one who seemed to have a couple of healthy days before diving back under.
Like I said, not that.
We’re fine.
We’re going to be fine.
What illness? I think they look great. Just fine.
It’s low grade.
Coughs linger. Long after kicking everything else, coughs hang on. He’s fine.
Runny nose, that’s what noses do on children. You’ve heard it (said it?): “snot-nosed kids.” Of course, I’m not talking about snot-nosed kids, our boys just happen to have runny noses right now. No big thing. They’re fine. If I posted a picture of these cuties you could never call them snot-nosed. I won’t post a pic, though, because their face is covered in runny nose. It’s gross.
And it’d melt your heart, in a breaking kind of way, to see their watery eyes, looking like “I don’t feel good, why’s this happening?, make this stop, make this stop, Daddy. Make it stop.”
Watery eyes. Yeah, we should probably watch that.
But we’re fine, just fine.
Here we go … let’s do this!
—Billy
Reading. Writing. Living.
Word Count: 73,710 / On Pace: 73,700 / Year’s Goal: 200,000
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