Rebekah, the human tissue

Last Sunday, Ellie developed a cough and Monday at breakfast she announced "I'm not feeling very good" over an uneaten plate of pancakes. Monday night it was a cough and a fever and a runny nose and by Tuesday all she wanted to do was watch Dora. Still, I was hopeful that she'd be better by Thursday (preschool day) and kept her quiet and gave her Tylenol and plenty of fluids and lukewarm baths, but Wednesday night she wouldn't sleep unless she was on me and wiping her nose all over my front. (Chris wants me to note that Eliza becomes extremely polite when she's sick. For example, she keeps telling him "I'm thirsty, may I please have a drink?" and this politeness is probably why he got her sick in the first place. Yes, Chris is in his third week of trying to study with enough pressure in his head to hydraulically launch a space shuttle into orbit, although he has politely refrained from using me as a bodily fluid receptical).

Thursday morning Ellie was coughing pretty hard and still felt warm, so I decided to risk hearing "It's just a virus and it just has to run it's course" and I took her in to the doctor. Dr. Anna gave her some Albuterol in a nebulizer and Ellie calmed right down and fell asleep on my lap. Then Dr. Anna listened to her lungs and diagnosed her with pnemonia. They gave her a shot of antibiotics and a prescription and sent me home with the nebulizer to share between the girls because by this time, Moira had started coughing and had a runny nose.

Thank goodness Ellie responded very quickly to the antibiotics and now she's running and climbing around like her normal self with an occasional cough (that she covers politely with one hand). But Moira's been busy wiping her nose on me and spitting up buckets of phlem. But her's really is just a virus and hasn't developed into pnemonia, which of course we're hoping it doesn't, and she seems to be mostly out of the woods as well--evidenced by her using her phlem to blow raspberries at me as I got her ready for her afternoon nap.

I can sum up the whole week by a moment today, when I asked Ellie to get me a tissue so I could wipe Moira's nose. She said "Sure!" and ran to the bathroom. Moments later she returned with a piece of toilet paper the size of a bug squished between her fingers. "A little bigger than that, please," I told her. She was off to the bathroom again and returned wrapped in toilet paper and dragging the rest of the roll behind her and laughing. I gave up and wiped Moira's nose on my shirt.

Off to do more laundry . . .