sick kiddos.

Yesterday, I stupidly said "I'm surprised Charlotte hasn't gotten sick yet" and within an hour she spiked a 102 fever. When will I learn to keep these sorts of thoughts to myself?

Charlotte, however, does not have a fever this morning, 6 hours after her last Tylenol dose. So I'm hopeful that her version of the illness will be less severe. Elisabeth showed up at our bedroom door at 11pm last night. This is not the ideal way to start out a peaceful night of sleep. Elisabeth can only sleep in the same bed with us if she sleeps perpendicular to us. She is like her canine sibling, Maggie, in that respect. This wasn't a problem last night, though, because perpendicular or not - the kid wasn't able to sleep because of the hacking cough she had approximately every 60 seconds. Finally Doug decided to scavenge for some cough drops. I knew she'd be excited for candy, and also predicted her next reaction - 5 seconds after sucking on the cough drop she said, "Daddy, I'm done with this." They don't taste good. Luckily we had some circa 2000 "Get Better Bears." We let her suck on the medicinal lollipop and I took her back to her room and we both slept in there - with the humidifier. Those two things worked to let us sleep for about 90 minutes and then she had to go potty. One enormous bladder emptying later, we got back into bed where she would not go back to sleep. I'm estimating 4 hrs of sleep all around - except for Charlotte who got a mostly normal night except for an early wakeup and several bouts of fussy crying in the middle.

Four hours of sleep does not build up enough mommy-goodwill to make it through a day alone with two sickies, one of whom is 3 and didn't sleep well and therefore incorrigible. Let's just hope that the new title of this blog isn't "lives no longer in being" or "lives that were" or "yep - it vested."