Hear ye, Hear ye

Your friendly neighborhood FarmWife shall be writing her first ever guest post on Monday! Sarah at Ordinary Days is heading off on vacation (of which I am insanely jealous...yes, I know we just went on one, but you can never have too many vacations) and has asked me to fill in for her Monday. I've been given free reign to write about what ever I like & link back here as much as I like. As Uncle Ben would say, "With great power comes great responsibility." So now the question arises....what exactly do I write about? I rarely plan that out here, so should I follow my total lack of an outline and wing it, or should I plan ahead & write something scathingly brilliant? Oh the uncertainty...

In other less fabulous news, Bitsy did not sleep last night. Instead she tossed & turned, nursed & screamed, flopped around in my arms in a failed attempt to get comfortable, and finally spiked a fever of 104. Yeah, last night sucked. Bad. When I realized she was developing that hot dry head my babies get when becoming feverish, I gave her a dose of Tylenol...which she promptly returned to me along with all the bananas she ate for dinner almost 6 hours earlier. I broke out the rectal thermometer only to discover it had died on me since the last time she got sick. Eventually I found the kids oral thermometer & used it instead (much to BabyGirl's horror...she thinks I've been doing that all along. "Why would you put that in Bitsy's bottom if you put it in our mouths?!" I assured her it had never been in Bitsy's bottom before & would never again be in anyone's mouth. I'm not sure she's convinced). At that time it read 100.9.

I tried to get her in bed, but everytime I'd lay her down, she'd start screaming again. Husband ended up holding her in the recliner until she fell asleep, then attempted to sleep there with her. It didn't last long. He put her in her crib & crawled back in bed. I was just about to doze off (I think it was about 2:30 by this time & I'd been up since 12:30 am) when a 3.6 earth quake hit. It was a fast, strong quake & nearly scared the pee out of me. I sat bolt upright & grabbed Husband's arm. He rolled over & said, "What?" Apparently he didn't feel it at all. BabyGirl did. Within 5 seconds, she was in our bedroom door saying, "Mommy! Daddy! We just had a BAD earth quake!!" She crawled in with us only to toss & turn & want to cuddle close & talk for the next 30 minutes. Once BabyGirl settled, Bitsy was back up.

In the end I made a pallet on the living room floor & got about 2 hours of broken sleep in between episodes of calming down the baby (who by 4 am was running a 103.9 degree fever & finally kept down a dose of Tylenol). She's had a runny nose since Sunday & a bit of a cough. Yesterday she started rattling a bit when she breaths. We're seeing the NP at 2:30 this afternoon.

And to top it off, I have a cough. It started Sunday night. It's shallow & dry & but raspy & irritating. Yesterday Busha told me it sounds just like the cough my Aunt A had when she had TB almost 30 years ago. Like I don't have anything better to do than worry I'm suffering from consumption. Oy.

Before you all start to panic & demand I get a TB skin test, all the kids have had coughs & runny noses lately. I'm pretty sure they've just shared with me. Yippee.