i would not have been a good frontierwoman

The past few days have been filled with one sick kid (Cheer) and his various body fluids, fevers and doctor visits, now another sick kid (Shout) and croup and (ok, a little tiny Hallelujah for this) laryngitis. And a snow storm, a power outage and a bunch of locusts that came out of nowhere.

School was cancelled yesterday, even though the major part of the storm wasn't predicted to hit until 4pm. By 3:30, I was about to lose my mind. The kids were fighting, it was raining hard and Shout had gotten up at 5AM and was completely falling apart. (Little did I know, she was also getting sick...)

So I went to the liquor store.

Because what else should I do when a heavy, wet snowstorm is bearing down on me, I'm home with 4 grouchy kids, one of whom is sick, and there's no wine in the house? I didn't spend all those years in Girl Scouts for nothin', people! Preparedness is my middle name. (Pretty much.)

By the time I picked up 2 bottles of wine and headed back to my car, the rain had turned to snow and it was thundering. Thundersnow... great. 3:58PM. Great job, weather dudes.

And that's when I saw the locusts.

On the way back home, I stopped at CVS to buy eggs, in case we wanted to make cookies, which would go well with the wine and DuraFlame logs because a cozy fire would cap off my fantasy of a snowy evening sipping wine and eating cookies. (Yeah, I know. As IF.)

My car literally skidded home whereupon I called Laundry Dad (at 3:30PM) and told him to leave work and head for home. (He didn't listen to me, and we're still debating whether or not that was a smart move.)

He finally headed for home around 7PM and discovered that the roads were gridlocked and cars were skidding every which way. He ended up driving from DC to Virginia in order to get to Maryland, which if you know anything about this area, makes no sense whatsover. But somehow he made it home from work (which is about 10 miles away) in 2.5 hours. Apparently this was record time for yesterday because some people spent 9 hours in their cars to go the same distance.

Sometime during those 2.5 hours, the power went out. It was fun at first. We had a roaring DuraFlame fire (but no cookies) and we all cuddled up on the couch with blankets. Cheer experienced a miraculous recovery at the first sight of snow and got off the couch for the first time in 4 days to do his Happy Dance.

Laundry Dad finally got home, we piled every last blanket onto the beds and went to bed. When we woke up, we had a measly 4 inches of snow and still no power. So we went off to go sledding and I then realized that Shout was looking less than perky.

I brought her home, wrapped her in blankets (it was now 53 degrees in the house) and discovered her temperature was 101.5 and she had a barkey cough. Great. There was no way to steam her up in the bathroom because our water heater is electric. The other great option for croup is to take her outside into the cool air. Except the cool air was right inside our house and wasn't doing anything.

I wondered how many dirty looks I would get if I brought my sick kid to Starbucks to nebulize her. Then I found some (slightly) expired kids prednisone and debated giving her that, except I had no way to look up the correct dosage on the internet. Gah. I was pretty sure if I called the pediatrician, he would not think it was a good idea to give one kid a dose of expired prednisone prescribed for another kid.

(And this is really where mothers everywhere are nodding their heads. We've all been there, right?)

In the end, the power came back on this afternoon, I used albuterol in the nebulizer (which isn't nearly as effective as prednisone, but I'm hoping it will get us through the night). Our house is warm again. Laundry Dad and Tide are at hockey (which is never cancelled) and all the kids have napped today. (Which is probably not a good thing, but it's been 10 years since I could say THAT.)

I'm putting all my money on the groundhog. In a few days, he is going to pop out of that hole and NOT see a shadow and spring will immediately ...um... spring. (My very first blog post was about Groundhog Day. It's almost my 3 year blogoversary. Wow.)

Hope you all are warm and dry tonight.