When it Rains You Need to Alternate Tylenol and Motrin...

Normally, inspiration for blog posts hit during the most inopportune times.  Like when I am sailing down the interstate at 75 miles an hour with 4 kids in the backseat or when I am in the shower or in the middle of the night when I wake up to pee (You don't?!).  It comes as an entire post, a sentence fragment, or just an idea.  Luckily for you, but not for me, I happen to be up at 1 AM, with a laptop handy, so you get to see how my mind works in the middle of the night - and frankly, so do I, since I forget what I thought of most of the time.  I remain convinced, however, that if I could just retain my thoughts long enough to actually put them on paper or computer screem, that I may prove to be secretly brilliant.

Last week, I had our 1 year old Labrador neutered.  He took it pretty dang hard.  The first night he whined and cried and carried on until I was forced out of my bed to hunt down the doggie downers.  I resisted taking one and instead, put it in a piece of cheese and tricked poor Brown Dog into thinking I was *that nice* to give him a yummy 3 AM snack.  After the big fake out, I commanded him to go to bed, and threw yet another piece of cheese (this one was not laced) into the kennel, and shut the door on his sad, confused self.  Then I went back to bed where I slept for another 3 glorious hours.  The best thing about having him neutered was the response from my six year old son after I explained to him about "what happened" to Brown Dog.  He looked at me, kinda greenish, and said, "I think I am going to throw up." Oh and my 7 year old daughter has been telling everyone that comes in the house to "be gentle with Brown Dog, he got noodled." HAHA!  Ok, so that was two things.  If you haven't, you really should "noodle" your dog or cat, the kids are hysterical.

Shortly after that, my 6 year old son had caps put on a couple of his teeth.  My dh enjoyed telling half the church population that, "Brown dog got snipped and my kid got capped." Nice, I know.  I love him anyway.
Then, a couple days later, my 7 year old had to see her pediatrician.  She was complaining about neck pain.  Somehow or another, we left with an appointment to see an ENT, which resulted in her being scheduled for a tonsilectomy and an adenoidectomy.  While waiting for that day to arrive, my 3 year old got a cough a high fever.  One trip to the doctor later left us with a child diagnosed with a respitory infection.  That night, as I was kissing and hugging all my babies before bedtime, I noticed, my son's face was swollen on one side and his lips were lopsided.  That required a trip to the dentist first thing the next morning.  One of the teeth that were capped were infected and now we have and antibiotic and a root canal scheduled for him next week.

My husband decided that maybe we should have tithed off that income tax return and charged it to our credit card. I find that hysterical at 1 AM in the morning. HAHA!

Onward forward to the day of my daughter's surgery.  She did good. She is in a lot of pain but otherwise doing well.  My son now has a migraine and my baby woke me up at 1 AM crying. Her ear hurts. Boo. I know what that means, her respitory infection has turned into an ear infection.

It seems when it rains, sometimes it pours, and it is hard to see the blessings in life.  I want to go bang my head on a wall, repeatedly, until this is all a fuzzy memory.  But, instead, I am also remembering how hard it was a year ago to find anyone to care for my girls when my son was sick. This time around, a bunch of new friends later, I had no less than 3 offers of childcare, and someone even brought us dinner tonight.  I did not have to worry about what I was going to do with kids or what I was going to do for dinner and that was a huge blessing indeed!