How Do You Like Them Apples???

My Sloanie loves her an apple. She'll carry around an apple for HOURS, slowly gnawing away. She'll eat an apple clear down to the core, but every once in awhile she gets sick of the apple before it's gone. She knows that if she gives it to me I'll throw it away. So, lately, she hides her apples. It's always awesome to open a cupboard door and find a half-eaten apple sitting there.






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Since yesterday, I've been nursing sick babies back to health. I had a tiny cold on Sunday, nothing serious, but it wasn't long before Maddox caught it and then Sloane soon followed. Holynd, however, seems to be unfazed.

I've never had a small baby get sick. My girls were older when they got sick and so it was less scary and worrisome. I do not like hearing my little Pudee cough. It's heartbreaking. It's easy to help Sloane drink lots of fluids, give her medicine for congestion, make sure she rests and it even helps that she can kinda tell me what's wrong. Pudee can't and that makes me feel so helpless as a mother. I hate to leave him alone. I hate having to keep the girls away from him at all times. I hate not being able to help him understand what the sickness is and that it will soon clear up. It makes me wonder if that's how the Lord feels when we're going through trials. I bet He aches to tell us that the trial will pass; that one day we'll look back and think, "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

Having sick kids does make me grateful for a lot. I'm a wuss. There's no way I could have taken care of sick kids while coming across the plains. I'm not sure I could take care of sick kids without a cell phone on hand! (How would I know that the outside world still existed!?) I know that there's no way I could have done it without Diet Pepsi. Nope. Nada. I'm extremely grateful that the worst I've ever had to deal with was a bad flu Holynd got when she was 12 months old. No ear infections, sinus infections, no RSV or anything like that.

I'm so grateful for toys and a playroom. A place where we can sit and lay low while the snot clears.












Our playroom is always messy. Once a week, I take on the task of deep cleaning that room. Everything is put away, organized, sanitized, vacuumed, dusted and made right. It takes me about an hour to clean it and about 2 minutes for the girls to mess it up. It's taken a lot of will power for me to just let that room be. I promised myself I would give that room to the babies when we moved. It's theirs. That room has been a fort, castle, stage, doctor's office, store, movie theater, construction zone, etc etc etc etc etc etc. At one point, Matt built the girls a blanket-tent that stretched almost across the entire room. We've spent a lot of time in that room in the last two days. We'll probably be spending the better part of the weekend down there waiting for these colds to pass.