I am so lost as to what day it is. It started on Wednesday night. George was playing at the usual bar that night for a memorial of a girl who worked there who had died recently. He never plays in the middle of the week. Therefore, I immediately thought that Wednesday was actually Friday, especially when he came home at 3 am. Then he ended up staying home on Thursday and Friday because he was sick with the Cold And Flu Plague Of 2006 – complete with scary coughing, fever, congestion, and basically feeling like he had been run over by a fleet of tanks. In any case, although he essentially spent those two days in bed with only very infrequent trips out to the living room, I still knew he was home and that made it feel like those days were the weekend. To top off the confusion, he worked for a few hours this morning, so I felt like we were back at Monday. I kept wondering why there were so few updates anywhere online only to remember that this is actually the weekend.

This is what happens when you don’t work outside the home: You lose all sense of the days of the week unless you can rely on someone else’s work schedule (or in my case, my must-see-tv schedule) to tell you where you fall in the calendar.

Luckily George is better today. He’s still coughing and sneezing but he’s alive and able to function and eat again. The downside is that Hayley woke up at 1:15 in the morning, coming to tell me that she was really thirsty and needed some water. She never goes through the entire cup of water I give her at bedtime so I had a bad feeling that this meant her throat was a bit sore. Also a bad sign (though a good thing overall at the time) was that she went straight back to bed and to sleep, whereas she would normally feel like it was a fine time to have a big conversation about everything under the sun.

This morning she unfortunately woke up at 5:30. She came out to the living room, groggy and staggering. Every night I lay down a thick blanket on the floor and place her special quilt on top and she often sits there to eat her breakfast and watch a show or two on Treehouse while I feed Breanna and struggle to wake up. Today, she sank down on the blankets, moaning that she was dizzy. She felt pretty warm too. although a quick temperature check showed she was still under fever levels. Then she let out a god-awful hacking cough that sounds like it should come from a 90-year-old two-pack a day smoker, not a three-year-old child. She laid down on the floor with her pillow and I crashed on the couch with a drowsily nursing Breanna; Hayley reached up to hold my hand, stared blankly at the ceiling, and then fell asleep for about an hour and a half or so.

The sleep didn’t help much. Her cough was worse and she did get a fever. Since George was at work, his sister came by with some Tylenol cold meds for her. I normally don’t give cough medicine during the day, believing it’s better to get it out and save the meds for night time, but she was just so pathetically miserable that I gave her a dose. She was quiet all morning, eating little more than a bag of raisins and a pudding cup. When George came home, they laid on the bed for awhile and she fell asleep for over an hour in there, something that never happens when Daddy is home.

She continued with the non-eating through lunch and supper, not even eating her greatly loved mashed potatoes. After supper I made her a batch of applesauce and she finally ate that, devouring the entire thing. She was mildly feverish by then so we dosed her up again, got her into pajamas and I read her and Breanna a story in bed. She seemed reluctant to go to sleep but it took less than five minutes for her to conk out. I went to check on her half an hour ago and she looks like she hasn’t moved an inch since she passed out. I hope she manages to sleep all night, though I’m doubtful. At least the cough suppressant seems to be working thus far, since I haven’t heard her cough in her sleep at all.

And of course, I’m sitting here, drinking a hot cup of tea to try to soothe an ache in my throat. I’m trying to ignore the coughing that I keep feeling the need to do, and the slight sniffling in my nose. The headache is harder to ignore, but I’m a long-time headache girl so I can still function for now. It’s just rotten timing (is there ever GOOD timing to get sick?). If it hits me tomorrow, at least George will be here to help me, but he has to work on Monday and I’ll be here, sick with one recovering pre-schooler and one baby. I really hope that I don’t get it as badly as George did or I’m going to be so screwed.

Still, I’d rather get it now so that my body starts fighting it off and passes the antibodies in my milk to Breanna. It’s bad enough that Hayley is sick, but at least she can take something for it. I can’t take anything other than throat lozenges, tea, and steam, but I’m an adult. A baby can’t take anything nor can she understand what the hell is going on. Please don’t let Breanna get sick.

And there is your really long holy-shit-she-IS-verbose Saturday update.