Wednesday

It's been a looong couple of weeks. What I didn't mention in my earlier posts is that we've all had the flu for the past couple of weeks. Josh got sick a month or so ago with a fever and a cough that just wouldn't go away. His fever finally went away but the cough lasted for weeks. Just about the time we realized that his cough was finally gone, Matthew got it. Fortunately Matthew's version of it was milder and he just had the fever for a day or two and his cough wasn't nearly as bad.

And then I got it REALLY bad. I had a high fever and my whole body hurt for a week. I spent days alternating between having the chills and feeling like I was freezing to death to being so hot I could barely stand it. It was miserable.

Just about the time I started feeling better, Clarissa got it. If we all had to get sick I kind of wish we had all just gotten it at the same time, but we seemed to be taking turns and it drug the whole thing out for an extremely long time! Clarissa got it the worst of all. She had a high fever that wouldn't go away and her cough sounded terrible. We spent days and days just laying on the couch snuggling because she didn't feel like doing much else. Finally this past weekend we decided that she wasn't getting any better so we took her to the doctor and he diagnosed her with bronchitis and possibly a sinus infection.

Now she's on antibiotics, which have done wonders for her cough but the antibiotics are causing stomach problems that I won't even get into, but it has pretty much undone all the work we had done with potty training. We've got a constant code brown situation happening here, and she's still got almost another week of antibiotics left to take.

So needless to say, this hasn't exactly been my favorite month. I don't know what's up with all the sickness in our house this year. The kids hardly ever used to get sick. We would get a round of colds or whatever like everyone does occasionally, but we've now had the full blown flu go through our house twice in the past six months. We seem to be on the mend now though, so that's good. I'm hoping this is the end of it for a while.

In duck news, I think our ducks are pretty much gone. The male still shows up to eat occasionally but I haven't seen the female in several days. Either she has found another place to lay eggs or she has moved on. After the two eggs in our yard got broken I hoped that she would stick around and lay more in a safer spot, but she didn't. We have the awesome duck house in the corner of our lawn now though, and I plan to try really hard next year to talk the ducks into using it! I think if I keep their food in there I might be able to talk them into making themselves at home in there. If nothing else, it looks cute in our yard!

And speaking of our yard, I'm really excited about how it's looking this spring. We had the handman guys here to rebuild our fence and while they were at it we decided to have them do several other yard projects that we've been putting off and they really have the yard looking great. It's been nice while we've been in the house sick all month to have someone else doing all the spring yard work that we weren't able to get to. I'm really excited to enjoy our yard this summer. I'm especially looking forward to it getting warm enough for us to start up our backyard movie theater! We still need to built a stand for the screen and I'm still on the lookout for a real movie theater popcorn popper and then we'll be good to go as soon as it gets warm enough! I've been looking forward to this all winter!

The other thing I'm looking forward to is Josh's 12th birthday this weekend! I can hardly believe that he's going to be 12. That kind of blows my mind. I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday and he said that he wanted to go bowling, so Saturday morning we're off to the bowling alley. We had so much fun there a couple of months ago that I think it will be the perfect place to celebrate his birthday. We're all looking forward to it! He's growing up so fast.

In the midst of all that we've got plenty of end of the school year projects to keep us busy. We're helping Josh with a big science fair presentation that he has to do next week and Matthew has to enter something in the invention convention coming up, so we're trying to find something to invent, which has been tricky. We live in an area with a lot of engineers and men in technology careers and unfortunately for our children, that is not our strength. Shawn and I are not super talented when it comes to inventing, creating or building things, so every time one of these science fairs or invention conventions come up, we feel really bad for our kids that they have us as parents, lol. Matthew just had to deal with us in the great Pinewood Derby Car Fiasco of 2012. Poor kid is now stuck with us as his helpers in inventing something. So we're conducting science experiments on water tension with Josh for his project and helping Matthew come up with something to invent for his project and it's keeping us pretty busy at the moment. Life is crazy but we're loving it! :)