New Baby

Yup. We have a new little one in our house. If I haven't already contacted you, please email me for details. My life is more than a little chaotic at the moment... I don't mean to be rude.

Thank goodness for my priority list. I would be very overwhelmed right now if it weren't for that. That and routines. Priorities and routines. Very good things. :)

Posts will be rare for the next month. Rachel is sick right now (can you tell we ran out of echinacea and didn't resupply?) and Sarah is recovering from a nasty fever, so chances are good therapy won't happen this week, not to mention we're still getting used to having a newborn in the house again. However, this bout with severe illness has been a surprising mark of progress. Sarah's ability to reason and listen to reason (like when she tried to argue her way out of taking any medicine) has improved dramatically: she bargains now regarding how much she has to take. We've used bargaining in other situations, but she's never been willing to bargain when it comes to any sort of medicine... even the ones that taste like candy. Now, we were able to get her to take some of the medicine willingly (we hid what was left in juice... I know... we're sneaky).

Rachel, during this illness, has been using her words in spite of her lethargy. And her improved pronunciation has paid off this time around in that she's able to speak pretty clearly, even when she's completely exhausted. Not everything comes out clear, but we can hear she's doing much better than even a month ago.

What's really creepy about this illness is we aren't the first to get it this time around. There were people at Rob's job who had come down with this and several of our friends who have been fighting it off for a few weeks now. It's a nasty bug that seems to linger forever and I'm surprised it took as long as it did to come to our house. I had been hoping we would miss it entirely.

On a side note, all this work we've done with Rachel and Sarah has come in pretty handy recently... a close relative of mine was involved in a four-wheeler accident and cracked his skull (idiot didn't wear a helmet). As I've been talking to yet another relative about his condition, his progress, his recovery, etc. I find myself returning again and again to things I've learned working with Rachel and Sarah. For example, I was really happy when I found out that friends and relatives have been playing games with The Idiot Who Didn't Wear a Helmet. They were doing it to help him get his mind off his current predicament, but I learned several years ago that games are the best way to help the brain develop new pathways and heal. The person who was telling me this also knows how helpful games are so it's nice to have that level field as well. With the new baby, I haven't been able to visit The Idiot. I'm not too happy about that. But I can do Google searches here at home and relay what I find if it's useful. And thanks to my past experience with this, I have a better idea of what's useful and what isn't.

Anyway, enough rambling. Baby needs me and I still have to get the kitchen cleaned up from breakfast. Then, I rest. Lots of resting this week.

Is the illness over?

So, yesterday we got our order from LifeBalm: two Kid-e-Mins, one Kid-e-Mune, one bottle of echinacea extract for Rob and I (just in case) and one bottle of Dr. Christopher's lower bowel formula (again for Rob and I).

As soon as we got the package, I broke out some orange juice I'd been waiting to pass out once the tummies were all settled (it seemed like they never were) and we gave the kids appropriate doses hidden inside, with the youngest getting theirs first.

Our firstborn son, the one we've had the most trouble with lately, laid down on the couch for the rest of the evening and didn't move unless he had to. Our youngest boy fell asleep early. The girls all stayed awake but were much more quiet than usual. Meanwhile, I kept waiting for someone to throw everything up.

This morning was the first morning we've had in a week where no one threw up. There are no sniffles now and our boys are (as of this writing) back at full YEAH strength. Now, it has happened before that the kids seemed to be all right and they weren't, but for the past month or two there has always been someone with the sniffles or a low-grade fever, even when they seemed to be okay in all other respects. For there to be no sniffles whatsoever in our house is, in my opinion, a miracle. I hope it lasts. :)

So, we're back to school and the full schedule of before.

A new blog and more herbs

Okay, I don't have my initial blog idea up and running yet. But I do have the secondary one going. It's focus is on frugality and is called Homemaking Cents. I'm working on the layout bit by bit as time goes on. It's not a blog I want to spend a whole lot of time on, but it does give me a chance to talk about some things that I don't think will fit on the other blog.

Good gosh, now I have two active blogs. Will I be able to post on them as often as I like? We shall see.

As for the kids, Rachel and Sarah (along with most of their brothers and sisters) have been dealing with the stomach flu. It turns out, there's a lot of people we know here that can't seem to shake this thing, whether it appears as strep throat, a stomach virus, a bronchial infection or just a common cold. One member of our church has been fighting this for several weeks.

So, we decided we've had enough and are going to bump this up a notch. We'd been putting off getting our cold and flu herbs for various reasons, mostly because every other bug we've been able to battle off using food alone (not to mention the intense cleaning this house has gotten). This one seems to be pretty stout so we've gotten some of Dr. Christopher's herbal remedies that we discovered knock this thing back, but that we're very low on. Hopefully they'll arrive during the weekend and we'll finally get over this illness and back to work.

So, yeah, because we've been sick, we have done next to nothing in the way of school or therapy. Oh, well. I've always said one of the beauties of homeschooling is schedule flexibility.

(On a completely unrelated topic, we ended up giving the dog to our city's animal shelter. That has helped my husband more than either of us realized it would... within minutes actually and within an hour almost all of his symptoms were gone. Most of what he's been fighting off, it turns out, has been his allergies to the dog. Sad, but true.)

colds

So, we've all been taking turns being sick for the past week. Today is my turn it seems, though as any mother knows, being a mommy means you aren't sick. At least, you can't be sick if you want the house to stay halfway organized instead of looking like a hungry pack of little monsters ravaged through your house with nothing more than hungry stomachs and an intense need to color walls.

Thank goodness for garlic and my husband's homemade Supertonic (and thanks to Dr. Schulze for giving us such an awesome formula in the first place).