The Three S's

Strep
Stitches
and
Second-degree burns

Yeah, February hasn't been the best month for us so far.

Last Monday, Maggie started running a fever. When she threw up Tuesday, I figured she just had a stomach bug and let it run its course...and run its course...and run its course until she woke up Friday morning still running a high fever. So I finally took her to the doctor and it turned out to be strep throat. Argh! Instead of spending the week comforting the invalid day and night with drinks, medicine, and back scratches, we could have actually had a week! If only I'd gotten her on antibiotics earlier... There was one day last week when I got up in the morning, sent the boys to school, went to the gym, put Becca to bed, and, exhausted from getting up every hour all night long, sat down on the couch with Maggie and Brian--the next thing we knew we were all waking up three and a half hours later!

And then, just as Maggie started behaving like a normal child again, she flipped off the little ride-around car (actually, I think Matthew pushed her) and split her chin open on the tile. Hooray. And of course, Brian wasn't home...and our neighbors have stomach flu...so I threw shoes and coats on all the children and herded them into the car while Maggie was wandering around, crying and bleeding. I dropped the kids off at some friends' house where Brian was getting ready to head out to his rec. league basketball game, and Maggie and I raced for the Insta-care. She ended up with seven stitches that give her a nice little goatee, but she was brave and didn't cry or struggle while the doctor (the same lady who took care of Becca's thumb) sewed her up. And now we've got our needy invalid back again.

That was last night. Tonight, Becca burned her thumb and index finger on the space heater Brian keeps in the basement. Funny thing is (actually, not so funny), not ten minutes before she burned her hand, I asked Brian if that heater was safe to touch and he reassured me that while it wasn't, Becca would never touch it. Whoops. After a few futile attempts to help her calm down and ease the pain from the blisters that were developing on her poor little fingers, we filled a tray with cold water and let her splash away. She made a huge mess, got both of us soaking wet, and cheered right up. Then I tried to bandage it up, as per the instructions in my Health and Wellness book. Let's just say that any aspirations I ever secretly harbored about becoming a nurse have pretty much been shot down. Even with leftover self-adhesive stretchy bandaging tape from her stitches holding it in place, that bandage was a mess and lasted all of 2 minutes before Becca managed to pick it apart and unravel the whole thing. Then she was crawling around with the long string of gauze trailing behind her...and then she tripped over it and landed on her face. But even without anything covering her poor little hand, she doesn't seem to notice the injury since she got it good and numb in that freezing cold water. Poor, poor baby.

I wonder what's going to happen tomorrow night.