December 15

Last Sunday the girls decorated our large gingerbread house. Once they were allowed to sample it, the roof was broached. This was a new experience for me to eat the actual gingerbread so early. Normally the house sits so long (with just candy being eaten) that the gingerbread gets stale and hard. Then if you wait long enough it gets soft again. That is when I was used to eating it.

Also last Sunday, we went to lunch at Aladdins. This is one of our favorite places to go as a family because they are quick, kid-friendly, and relatively healthy. Amy hadn’t had much for breakfast and had waited much longer than usual before having more food. I assumed that her distress at Aladdins was due to being very hungry. She was miserable and then had chills. She said her legs didn’t feel right. I started to freak out. We did get some food and drink in her and then I took her to the car to call the healthcare advice line. We went home and Amy had advil and a nap. When she woke up she seemed completely better. She went to school on Monday seeming totally well. Monday night took her down with a fever and repeated puking. So Tuesday she was home and enjoyed some quality snuggle time with our cat Olivia. Wednesday she seemed better aside from a cough. Thursday, similar, though the cough was a bit more intense so I questioned my judgement. It is hard when Amy fights so hard to go to school. It is hard for me to force her to stay home. Thursday night her cough was so persistent she couldn’t go to sleep so we went to the Express Care walk-in service at the Children’s Hospital. Two hours later we were home after she had been given liquid steroid and a breathing treatment with albutirol. The doctor said her coughing sounded like that of someone with asthma where they get in a cycle of inflammation causing coughing which then causes inflammation which causes coughing. We were sent home with a nebulizer to continue breathing treatments until her cough is much better and 4 days of the steroid to help calm everything down. These treatments have helped immensely. Now it is notable when she does cough rather than being notable when the cough abates for a minute, which is how it was on Thursday evening. 

Due to Amy’s situation I was ripe for the duping on Wednesday morning when Sarah uncharacteristically came downstairs as soon as I turned on the hall lights to wake her. Usually we go through 4 rounds of my turning on the lights and her scampering out as the Light Bandit to turn them off.  (As she says, "the Light Bandit strikes again!" Amy amended it to be “the Light Bandit Stripes again!” Then she comes down for breakfast, sometimes reluctantly. Wednesday she came right down and asked me if she could stay home because she didn’t feel well. I thought, I always distrust Sarah about these things and then so often I realize I should have trusted her, so this time I will trust her. Alas, in this case perhaps I should have doubted. It was very clear, after all calls had been made and plans cancelled, that she was totally fine. I chose to focus on the day as a mental health day, because I used to need those when I was little and my mom was wonderful to let me have them. She did rest more than usual. And she does have a cold now, so maybe somehow letting her have a day at home when it wasn’t technically needed helped her evade getting something as intense as Amy’s situation. I think I have made more peace with the fact that making decisions about kids staying home or not is rarely clear and that I will almost always have doubt no matter which decision I make.

We watched Mickey’s Christmas Carol and Sarah loved it even more than usual. Her favorite part is when Scrooge falls into the fiery pit of his own grave. After the movie was finished she really wanted to re-enact that scene so with Carl and Amy’s help she created a box with a hole into which a Donald Duck figurine could fall. Amy made flames from construction paper. Yesterday Sarah wanted to have a hole into which she could fall so she and Carl made one from pillows. 

My Christmas present to myself was finally tackling the giant, overflowing, overstuffed “to file” and “to shred” bins that sit on our mail shelf. Part of the problem was that our filing system in the basement was overstuffed so it was really frustrating to have to add anything. I spent a few minutes pulling out folders that I thought we didn’t need anymore and having Carl verify my decision. We now have a really big pile to take to a shredding place. At least half of what is going is old IEP notes and weekly progress reports from Sarah from when she was in her first preschool or even before that when she had Early Intervention at home. Even looking at the piles I had some sense memories that turned my stomach. Not that we didn’t have lovely people helping us and not that she didn’t progress wonderfully, but that was just such an intense time filled with worry and a lot of struggle, especially around getting Sarah to eat. I also decided we didn’t need every printout from every doctor’s visit she ever had. My promise to myself going forward is to never let the filing system get so frustrating again and to never let the bins on my mail table overflow again. 

I’ve been feeling grateful for our warm house, our healthy food, our time together as a family, reading Christmas books to Amy (because who knows how much longer I will get to read kids' books out loud? that hardly ever happens anymore), and having the time to deal with the areas of mess that have become fixtures in the house. It feels good to have that perspective rather than focusing on the drudgery of needing to deal with the mess. Clearly if the mess has been around this long it doesn’t really need to be cleaned, but I know I feel so much better when things are neater.