Is it Hot in Here?

As it turns out, its hard to blog from down here in Hell, where I've been all this week. 

I won't bore anybody with the details of my early week, except to say that after 4 days of Kieran's high fevers, coughing fits not helped at all by his asthma medications, and a cough so horrible it could only be generated by the Sound Effects people at Paramount, we wound up with a diagnosis today of pneumonia.  

Just great.

Of course, today, even before the Dr. called with the bad news from his chest X-Ray, Kieran was already better and was playing with his cars rather than lying semi-comatose on the couch, only answering questions with blinks and sideways glances as he had been since Monday. 

Now,  I may not have pneumonia myself, but I will apparently never miss an opportunity to elbow my own way into an illness. If there is something going around, I just need to get it for myself, so naturally I'm sick as well.  As is Kaya, although even sickness does not dampen her easygoing personality. She will sit happily on the floor, fever raging and in a pool of snot, quietly trying to cram a block into her mouth and smiling when you talk to her. 

But this morning was bad. After I sadly made my phone call to his babysitter to say that Kieran would be missing yet another day, Eric took pity on me and told me that he was still owed a half day at the office and could easily take the afternoon off, thus giving me a break to get outside the house and away from sick children. So, I whiled away the morning just doing laundry and waiting until he got home so I could take a leisurely shower instead of one where I had to keep one ear outside the curtain lest I missed the sound of one of the children coughing themselves into fatal asphyxiation. 

Around lunchtime, Kieran's doctor calls to tell me about the pneumonia. Yay. And a little while after that, Eric finally calls to say that he was just about the leave, but the battery on his key fob is dead and he only has a key to start the car, not the one that manually unlocks the doors. I have that key in my purse, of course.

He went to the Toyota Dealership next door and they did have a new key battery, but it still didn't work. So, seeing my leisurely shower and childless afternoon getaway slipping away, I load up the two kids, both sick, into the van to drive downtown. Eric isn't waiting at the front door of his office when I get there and, as usual my cell phone is dead and I can't call him. So I drive to the back parking lot and unlock the door of his car manually, noting that my key fob ALSO is not working. This, as it turns out, is rather an important piece of information, but since I know virtually nothing about cars, I didn't think about it. 

I drive back around front where Eric is now waiting, drop him back off at his car and give him all my Nissan keys. Since I'm feeling tired and sick myself, not to mention guilty about dragging two sick babies downtown, I drove off. About 20 minutes into the drive, I start having this weird feeling...like I should have waited to make sure that Eric's car started. 

Turns out, it didn't start. The battery was quite dead. He realized this seconds after I left the parking lot and had no way to get stop me. I come home to a series of messages, starting with the rant about me never having a charged cell phone and getting more frustrated as the messages went on. As it turns out, a co-worker gave him a boost and the car was humming merrily, but somehow during this time, all the doors had wound up being shut and automatically locked. With BOTH sets of our car keys now inside and Eric outside in the freezing cold and me back home. 

By the time I called him back, another co-worker had called CAA for him and he was now just waiting for them to come open his door. 

While listening to these messages, I'm also getting the kids out of their winter gear. Kieran was definitely feeling better, which was good considering I hadn't even picked up his antibiotics from the pharmacy yet. But as I was taking off Kaya's hat, I took a good look at her. She'd been a bit sick since Wednesday but, unlike Kieran's, her fever though consistent had been quite low. And the night before she had started the same alarmingly horrible cough that Kieran had. But she had never never seemed as sick as Kieran had so I didn't really pay much attention. But looking at her then, I just knew that something was very wrong. She was boiling hot, her eyes were all glazed and watery and she just looked generally awful. She had barely eaten all day and I tried to give her a bottle, but she just wasn't interested. 

I called the doctor's office, which by this time, was only open for another hour, and they told me to come right in, so I pack both kids back into their winter gear and the car and off we go. When the Dr. saw us sitting her in examination room, she gave me a look that clearly meant "oh my god, here's a panicking mother who doesn't even realize that pneumonia isn't contagious" but after she listened to Kaya's man-sized cough, raspy lungs and wheezy breathing, and heard about her low but prolonged fever, we had our second pneumonia diagnosis of the day.  And now I have two children with asthma puffers and breathing masks and a fireplace mantle lined with pharmaceuticals. 

Black Friday, indeed.