Here We Go Again...

Attempt number 12 at getting a family picture.
We have had just about three days of cool-ish weather and it has already begun: sick-o-mania is back. Last winter the Molloy family was plagued with illness at an alarming rate. With two little ones and day care and two adults working in a school it seemed that it was a losing battle - we were just going to have to deal with being sick constantly. And sick we were. Despite our efforts to disinfect, wash hands and keep germs away, one or more people in our household was sick at any given time from January through June (sadly, this is not an exaggeration). Then it seemed as though illness went on summer hiatus. By the end of June, Marty and I realized that it had been an entire month since someone was sick. A Miracle! Lucas, who had had a runny nose and severe congestion since literally the day he was born, was breathing normally and we hadn't had to wipe his nose in weeks. We made it through that first year of illness and now we were in the clear! Hurray!

That was our problem right there- overconfidence.

Opa and Oma with their grandchildren- Elise, Lucas and Eamon

It all started last Thursday when I got a phone call from school saying that they suspected that Elise had pink eye and I needed to come get her. This was slightly annoying because whenever Elise gets a cold, her eyes get runny. She has always been this way. Every time this happens they think she has pink eye, and every time I have to take her to the doctor to get a note saying she doesn't have it before returning to school. So after I picked her up, I called the doctors office who basically counseled me to not even bring her into the office. It didn't sound like pink eye to them (her eye was neither pink nor gooey and she has a long history of runny eyes when she has a cold) and there were so many sick people in the office that she'd probably pick something up while she was waiting to get her non-pink eye checked out. So I picked up a doctor's note saying as much, and went to talk to the people at day care who gave me the all-clear to send her to school the next day. Problem averted.

Elise and her second cousin Cory, 4

Then as I was getting Elise ready for dinner that evening I noticed she felt sort of warm, so I took her temperature, which turned out to be 101. SO much for going to school the next day. She had a low-grade fever on and off on Friday, but by Friday evening she was fever-less and acting completely normally. All day on Saturday and Sunday she was again fever-less. Random illness officially over. Not so fast! Sunday night when she randomly spiked a fever again. And again on Monday, she seemed totally fine and then all of a sudden got a fever. Tuesday she woke up with no fever, but had a bloody nose and could barely breathe. Finally by Wednesday she was well enough to return to school (an entire week after all this began!)

When she had a fever, she was a little less energetic than usual (which for her means that she was about as energetic as an average kid because she is definitely well above average in the energy category) and she was taking some really long naps, but had no other symptoms of illness except for a stuffy nose (which is almost normal for our kids).

Lucas and his great grandmother (Oma's mom)

Lucas, miraculously, did not catch whatever randomness that Elise had, and Marty and I also appear to be unscathed. Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come. Our pediatricians' office is completely "out of flu shots" and unsure if/when they're going to get another batch so we may have to just roll the dice with the flu this season. I, for one, am optimistic.