Social experiments: The spiritual cup

After a week of whatever the heck virus kicked my 3-year-old's tush, I think Josie is finally on the way to good health.

Now Charlie has it. We're on day four of vomit, though she might have skipped a day and I just don't remember. Sleeping (if you can call it that) sitting up with a trash can next to your bed for your 2-year-old to puke into tends to blur time and days.

I'm hoping this isn't going to be the beginning of a repeat of Winter 2012-13.

I refuse to panic about this. We're back to popsicles, Pedialyte and watered down juice. Charlie refuses to eat solid food, I think more out of fear of how much it will hurt if she throws up again. At the very least, I need to try every trick in the book to get fluids into her.

But all this trying to get them healthy is exhausting, and I hate to complain about my babies because they can't help what's happening, so on Sunday the kids stayed home with the Boy and off to church I went. I had a pie fundraiser to help button up so we could start baking on Monday. And my spiritual cup needed a refill.

No less a rock star

Sick kids are the worst.

It sucks.

It's not just sucky because they're sick, though. Sadly, it's more because the problem can't always be fixed and as a parent it makes you feel helpless. You spend all your time guiding, teaching, snuggling, kissing away the ouchies.

But then along comes a virus that wreaks havoc on your preschooler's intestinal tract and leaves in its wake little hands and little feet and, in our case, even a little nose covered in hives.

The cold from hell

This cold will go down in history as the most irritating thing to happen in my house. I swear it's a virus spawned from the devil himself.

Both girls have been a boogery, coughing, slimy mess for two weeks. The pediatrician said, "Lungs are clear. Looks like it's just a bad cold." That was 12 days ago.

That same day I realized they charged my insurance for two upper respiratory infections. It hit me that doctors, or the billing department, play the system as badly as some patients and it kills me. If my child has what you're going to tell my insurance company she's been diagnosed with, then I want an antibiotic for her. I'm not going to argue about what's ethical or not, but if a parent is going to see on the printout from the office staff that a diagnosis is an infection, then use the handy-dandy prescription pad you've been licensed to carry as it was meant to be used! Or, at the very least, use a different billing code.

Instead, we've gone through doses upon doses of pain reliever, cough medicine for my big girl, warm showers, gallons of water in the humidifier, sleepless nights and when all of that seemed to stop helping, I stopped caring if they drank my green tea and had popsicles for breakfast. At least they're getting fluids.