Oh, what a morning

My kids are sick. They both got the cold that I had last week. In retrospect I wasn't very proactive in doing anything last week to prevent them from getting it. Even while I was sick I continued my morning ritual of sharing a grapefruit with Jonah. We take turns having bites... from the same spoon of course.

It wasn't that bad of a cold - just a mildly runny nose, sore throat, and a bit of a cough. Not such a big deal when I had it, but now it's breaking my heart to watch my boys sniff and rub their eyes and listen to them cough and sneeze.

So this morning we added sickness to the regular craziness of our life. I don't know if it's because he's sick or just because he's a 2-year-old, but Jonah has been eating practically nothing lately. He won't even eat snacks. The only things he will eat without coercion are pears, oranges, peaches and candy - not really a balanced diet. This morning I made him eat a bite of cereal and then I gave him a second bite before he had quite finished the first. He gagged and threw up. Breakfast over.

I put Benjamin down for a nap thinking surely he would take a good nap since he's sick and he was so tired. Nope. That stupid 45-minute intruder. He hardly ever sleeps more than 45 minutes, but he really needs to. He's always still tired when he wakes up, but I can't get him to go back to sleep. So I nursed him, changed his diaper and put him in an undershirt. We went downstairs to get some clothes out of the dryer because he didn't have any clean outfits upstairs.

I sat Benjamin in the corner of the armchair as I often do and went to get an outfit. I sent Jonah to get his sippy cup from the fridge. As I was rifling through laundry I heard Benjamin start to fuss. I returned to discover that Jonah had gotten out a bottle of breast milk instead of his sippy. I was saving it to use with rice cereal so it didn't have a nipple on it, just a twist-off cap. Jonah had opened it and was trying to pour it into Benjamin's mouth. The end effect was a crying baby and spilled breast milk all over the chair and Benjamin's undershirt.

After a chat about how only Mommy and Daddy can feed Baby Benjamin, I wiped up the chair as best I could, removed the wet shirt, set Benjamin in the other corner of the chair and went back to the dryer to find another clean undershirt. This time I returned just in time to see Benjamin fall head-first out of the chair onto the hard wood floor. Commence screaming. The only good thing about a sick baby is that he's too hoarse to scream very loud.

We usually leave the house after Benjamin gets up from his nap and I decided to go out even though the kids were sick. It's either be stuck in the house and be miserable, or be out and be miserable, so I chose to be out. We couldn't do anything that involved being around other kids so we went to the discount grocery store. You never know what you're going to find there, but I can usually score some pretty good deals on drinks and snacks. Jonah behaved perfectly and Benjamin hung in there up until we were in the check-out line. He typically screams through the check-out line whether he's sick or well. Though it was a much quieter scream today thanks to his cold.

I fed Jonah candy in the car on the way home so he wouldn't fall asleep. Yesterday he fell asleep on the way home from our outing and then he wouldn't take a nap. Benjamin fell asleep immediately in the car, but of course he woke up shortly after we got home. I managed to get the groceries in the house while both kids cried (Jonah pinched his finger in the mail slot of the door). I set Jonah up in the kitchen with cheese, yogurt and a rice cake and went to nurse Benjamin. Benjamin ate a little then cried and barfed up some phlegm all over himself. Jonah didn't touch the yogurt, had two bites of cheese and two bites of a rice cake. We trouped upstairs to get Jonah to bed. Benjamin could barely hold it together while I read books. Once Jonah was down I went to put Benjamin down. On the way to his room he barfed up a lot more phlegm - this time mostly on me - but he then seemed much happier as a result. So we went downstairs again to get clean clothes for both of us out of the laundry. This time I put him in jammies in the hopes that maybe wearing pj's would help him sleep better. Thankfully he went down without much of a fuss.

So, here I am about an hour after everyone went down and they're still sleeping. Ah. I had a pop-tart for lunch because I just didn't feel like mustering the energy to make a sandwich. But now that I've sat here for a while I think I've rested enough to finish up with this laundry.

Hope your Friday was less crazy than mine!