Seashore Cure

Well, we have....as I tell the boys....only two more sleeps until our family is all back in one location again. We're all good and ready for A to come home.

Today the weather was still insanely gorgeous. The day started off with a misty, fog that was stunning against the beautiful fall colors we still have and the fog burned off into a beautiful, if sometimes cloudy day. It almost felt like spring...the air was moist and warm and smelled of leaves and green things.

We worked in the yard a little. I raked leaves into the hen's new pen which made them tremendously happy. We finished the stone garden borders in the front of the house which I have been working on for about two years. SO AMAZING to have it all done! I keep looking out the window again to enjoy the accomplishment. I also laid a little more of the brickwork (mortarless) that I am using to edge our front walk. Should have taken a picture...didn't think of that. I am using salvage brick that is all red and the standard size but otherwise varies in style and design and mossy character. I love how its turning out. I have maybe one third of the walk left to finish although at the moment I am out of brick and need to keep my eyes peeled for more being thrown out somewhere.

Poor little Nib was sick again today. This is his second illness in the course of A's travel. I let him sleep in a long time and then we did some gentle things around the house and read a bunch of story books and then it was time for something cheering. The boys and I took a cloth bag for beach combing and headed to the ocean.

It was gorgeous. We saw a school of big silver fish, swimming and sometimes leaping out of the water. We found horseshoe crabs and ark clams and beautiful driftwood and more oyster shells than we could count. There are oyster beds right off the coast here so loads of their shells wash up. Some of them get to be enormous. I also thought to myself that maybe next time the chickens are getting low on their store purchased oyster shell, I could just take a hammer to some of the extra shells we bring home from the beach. Wonder if that would work?

By the time we got home Nib was feeling 200% better (there is no place better to recover than the seashore) and little Pom was taking his place with a clingy attitude and permanent bad mood. I have him draped across my lap right now while I type...his feverish little self snoring away on my knee.
Have to remember the seashore for the next time I get deathly ill...it seems like such a wonderful place to be sick. The air feels cheering, the sound of water is theraputic, there are shells for combing, there are birds wheeling over you and the endless water sweeping out in front.

Man, do kids get sick a lot. Good thing I have an immune system that can handle it! I can usually avoid getting sick and if I do fall prey I usually get a lighter version. I'm all for that.

Do lets learn invincibility!

Golden Days On The Mend

Spending lots of time at home today. Nib has a ridiculous predilection to carsickness and this morning I briskly bundled him into the car to rush off to a bible study and ended up paying the price for my rumbledy driving holding his head over a toilet in the nearest rest area. So much for that outfit. I am really hoping that it turns out to just be a one-off, motion-sickness incident although I do hear that there are tummy bugs about. Boo. 

 On the upside, the weather is absolutely perfection and he felt totally normal again after a morning of work in the garden in which I weeded the strawberries within an inch of their life and the boys completely dismantled the brick wall in another part of the garden. Vitamin D is worth a certain price. I'm awfully glad that dry stacked walls can be re-stacked.

 We've been picking pears off a roadside pear tree that I discovered not far from the house, the flavor is wonderful and they are great treats for tossing in the car as we head off to baseball practices. They're also nice in the juicer, which means we can even find uses for the cracked ones that split when they fall from the highest branches of the tree.

I realize that sounds amzingly Ma Ingalls of me but it truly isn't. It takes no time at all to stop for five minutes and pick pears up off the grass and I haven't canned a single, darned thing this year even though I meant to with deepest intention. This is year two of my great hiatus from tomato sauce and canned peaches. We didn't even pick one peach this year.

 All the things in the vegetable garden were looking a bit past so I trimmed them all down a bit, thinking that I was beginning the autumn clean-up. There was a lot of material for the compost pile and some of the plants (the tomatoes for instance) were trimmed down to mere shadows of themselves. I was totally shocked to go out today and discover that they have all rebounded and flushed new growth such that they look like big full plants again. We are having a second round of produce! There's new leaves on the kale, the tomatoes are blossoming again and even the dahlias have begun  blooming all over. Never give up.

 We laid low today, skipped most of our lessons, read library books, took extra naps, played in the sunshine and watched Cheaper By The Dozen for the first time. I hate feeling anxious about the spread of germs and worrying about being behind but I do like the comfort of knowing that we are masters of our own schedule and if we so deem, we can take a day. I keep reminding myself that this is one of the biggest reasons why we homeschool. I cherish that lucky gift.

 I was just texting A and telling him to hurry soon (he's working late tonight) because any little family emergency is so much better with two. Isn't that the truth? Its so much better to go through crazy with someone who loves you. We have had real troubles in our marriage but I can honestly say, that we both feel that way about each other these days. Sometimes you need to stick it out, put in your time, read, grow, change and get help with wildly tenacious energy. I feel incredibly lucky to be going through life with someone that is a problem solver and a grower.

 I am off to kids club now, running all the non-sick ones off to enjoy their little pals and hoping that we have a quiet evening here at home. May the germs abate, may the hope rise and may you feel that you are over the hump! Happy Wednesday!

Terri Jean in Collage

My Aunt is in a coma.

She is improving and I hear that she is slowly, slowly coming around. Making hopeful little steps towards waking. I am thinking about her, sending her a lot of love and long-distance encouragement and connectivity and feeling nostalgic. I made this collage about her five years ago, during a random online obsession with collaging those who have been influential in my life. She was a wonderful aunt to a little girl with wide eyes. She fed me amazing, exciting things, lived the vibrant expression of an artist in front of me and was the carefree, silly kind of warmth that I still copy in crowded rooms.

Tonight I am thinking of her and rooting for her and telling the world how much she means to me! Come on out, Aunt Terri! We love you so!
xoxo
Your loving niece,
 

Sick and Reminiscing

We are all laying low today. We were hit with a wallop of illness on our way back home and it has only gathered strength  in the last day or so. Today was pajama, movies on the couch, bottomless cups of tea kind of day. Lots of sleeping, a little brow wiping, and lots of low energy mass lethargy.

In our season of convelesence I thought I'd share some of the warm little moments from our wild trip back to Michigan Daddy-less. Lots of great moments, special Northern beauty, great family and a full stock of happiness.  This is Michigan in March.

I think I'll go turn on the kettle again and take another nap. The baby has gone back to sleep on my lap and there are fluffy clouds floating in teh blue sky that I can watch out my bedroom window if I angle the right way on my bed. Survival. Its a survival game.

Crutches No More

A is off his crutches, although not quite back to normal, which is a very lovely thing. No more fear of stairs, no more terrifyingly slow crosswalk use, no more jamming them into the mini-van like another slim, metallic person, and no more A tripping everyone in sight with his dastardly go-go-gadget metal arms....just kidding on that last one. :) It is very nice though. The others are real gratefulnesses and we are so glad to have life a tiny bit more usual again.

The weather has been lovely but I hear that a tropical storm...morphing into a hurricane is slowly working its way up the coast. Time to hunker down. I need to post our ancient metal fireplace insert on Craigslist and then have the chimney cleaned so that we can have fires on the hearth again while we sit huddled with a stack of reads. Ru is getting better and better at reading but it is a mysterious skill almost entirely confined to his "reading book" where I've been working with him.

He is just starting to experiment with muttering sounds under his breath in a forgotten corner of the house or in the inner reaches of the minivan when he thinks I am not listening. His brow puckers and he makes little staccato attempts at sounding out an advertisement for Reese's cups or the latest volume of Asterix and Obelix from the library. Its a tenuous dance. I love watching him teeter on the edge of discovering the world of print but I hate to let him wait too long or miss the opportunity when he doesn't accidently make it work for himself. How much to push and how much let it be organic? The age old question. Just how unschooler am I?

This morning I lost Nib for a bit and then finally he answered  my shouts and came tripping brightly down from the second floor. It took until lunchtime before I figured out what he'd been up to. We had a "picnic" lunch on the kitchen floor together (Mommy laziness trick!) and I noticed he'd neatly address stamped the soles of his feet. If ever lost....he'll be no problem to return...as long as he's turned upside down and examined barefoot.

Rocky Mountain Spotted What????

We have been on a crazy, wild roller coaster as a family. Our first, real, health emergency. Sweet little Nib was bitten by a tick, ostensibly right here in our own city yard (we weren't really anywhere else at the time) and came down with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, the deadliest of the tick borne diseases. I've had Lyme's Disease before so I'm pretty cautious about tick illnesses now but this one was the scariest run-in yet. As with many of the tick sicknesses, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is a very evil trickster. It looks like nothing much (fever, rash, generalized aching) and then suddenly it starts doing clever things like attacking your internal organs systematically. The real key with tick borne illnesses is to look carefully for ticks attached to you after you've been outdoors and if you notice any symptoms of illness afterwards (particularly fever) get thee to a doctor and get thee on antibiotics. (So says the CDC in their official guidelines for tick illness.)

Some doctors (ours for instance) are conservative and feel disinclined to treat first, ask questions later and will drag their feet, suggest a wait-and-see plan and tell you it is unlikely you've been infected. While I completely and whole heartedly agree with this plan of action if we're talking about ear infections or the run-of-the mill coughs, tick diseases are different. The stage where they can be cured easily is the stage when they look like nothing much. Once they look serious the patient is often either untreatable or seriously damaged. My personal opinion is, treat....ask questions later. If a doctor tries to get you to have a blood test to prove that what you have is a tick borne disease, go along with it happily but insist that you be treated immediately after the test is administered...not when the results come back. Tick testing takes two weeks or so and waiting that long can be detrimental to health. Don't wait! The treatment is simply an antibiotic, a really kick-butt strong antibiotic but still...that's all it is, nothing crazy or involved.

Nib ended up being hospitalized in order to be observed and to have his antibiotic administered via iv in order to get it in his system more quickly and to keep an eye on the many things in his body that had started to complain by the time he was finally diagnosed (his kidney function, his liver enzymes, his hemoglobin numbers, etc.) after getting the run-around from the first doctors who saw him. We are so incredibly grateful for the internet, for the knowledge available at the tips of any parent's fingers about CDC policy and disease symptoms and even drug details. Without it I'm not sure we'd have our boy alive today.

We are also incredibly grateful to our local city hospital where our son was correctly and swiftly diagnosed and we were given such wonderful care from infectious disease specialists, nurses, pediatricians and everyone else involved in our case. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is a rarity in our area but it is here and so are several other more prevalent tick diseases. Don't fool around with ticks: use repellent, landscape with care, inspect yourself and your children after outings and use your local health department who will often receive and identify ticks  and sometimes test them for diseases which can help you determine if you should seek treatment....even when few or no symptoms present themselves (which can happen).

This week, I plan to call a non-toxic tick control company, lay down a little more mulch, double check our bug repellent stock, hug our son, and breath. Just breath.