Homemade Cough Remedy

I had a bad cough.  That is an understatement.  Forgive me for all my sick writing.  It does seem that our family gets slammed with illness in January.  Wait - it's not January anymore!  So we're a bit late.  That's pretty normal for us, too.

But my bad cough.  Nasty.  It was constant enough to make me wonder if I'd been a smoker in a previous life.  I coughed so much that every muscle between my sternum and my hips was screaming for three days.  Let me tell you, this is one way they never tell you about how to get rock-hard abs.  No sit ups for me, thankyouverymuch.  But man, was I working those core muscles!  And when I got a string of coughs going on, life just had to stop until I was done.

Angel keeps telling me to cough in my "oboe," so don't cough into your fist like in this picture.

I wanted to find some sort of fix for the cough attacks.  Hate those.  I did lots of research and found a variety of things that are supposed to make coughs better.  Chamomile (helps your immune system), honey (soothing to the throat), apple cider vinegar (anitspetic maybe?), lemon juice (thins mucous), and even cayenne pepper (suppresses pain receptors in your throat, I think).  And water, water, water.  Drink lots of water.

So I mixed them all up together and made this recipe.  Kind of reminds me of my little brother's first attempt at making a recipe.  He got out a bowl and poured in some milk and water.  He cracked an egg in it and sprinkled on pepper.  Then he crumbled up a piece or two of bread and floated them on top of the mixture.  When he was done, he slid the bowl into the fridge and waited for it to turn into something.  Cute boy!

COLD CONCOCTION TO MAKE YOUR COUGHS RUN AWAY.

Ready?

1 cup very warm chamomile tea
2-4 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1-2 teaspoons honey
dash of cayenne pepper.

Mix together and sip while warm.

At the first taste, my mouth wanted to turn inside out and run away!  After that it was better and I even liked it by the end of the cup.  Did a good job on my coughs, too, and kept the bad ones at bay for a few hours.  Two cups of this kept me good for the day.

David and Eddie were recipients of my concoction, too.  Eddie liked it, but David gasped it down as fast as he could.  But it helped.  Trent's face after his first swallow was great.  Trent should have had more, because the next day he was coughing hard enough to dislocate a rib.  Poor guy has been in horrible pain since then.  Maybe I'd better go make up more Cough Tea to pour on his back.  That'll fix him.

Pillow Problems

I hate pillows.  I really do.  They are never just right.  I know I've complained about this before, but when I am sick and I need sleep desperately, it's really a bummer to have to wake up every half hour because my ear is aching so badly where it hits the pillow.  I'm such a wuss.

I actually found pillows for sale that have a little groove or hole cut out for your ear.  Looks weird, but would it work?  I wonder.  I would hope they wouldn't make me feel claustrophobic that I couldn't move.

When Mom is Sick

First of all, Mom is not allowed to get sick.  Mom is the taker-carer.  Who takes care of everyone else when Mom can't?  And who takes care of Mom when she is sick?  No one, and no one.  Clearly, Mom can't get sick.  Except that I am.  The little ones were generous and shared.  Thanks a lot.  We've been doing a lot of sitting and coughing and having used-tissues snowball fights.

Speaking of used tissues, what do you do with them?  Angel likes to have an old ice cream bucket to collect them in.  Growing up, we just always used toilet paper, rather than the more-expensive-but-gentler-on-the-nose tissues in a box.  My mother would take the used tissues and stuff them into the cardboard roll.  When the roll reaches capacity, you take it to the garbage can and push out the used wad.  I always thought it was so icky, gross!  So now we do that, too.  Icky.  I think I'd rather do fancy artwork with the toilet paper tubes than use them to collect used tissues.  'Cuz I have the time for that.  And a siesta in the hammock too, please.

So what does a family do when Mom is sick?  They go bananas, that's what.

Top Things To NOT Do When Mom is Sick:
Have Dad need to work overtime
Have parent/teacher conferences
Run out of medicine
Run out of food
Need dinner or any other meal
Use up anything that would require a trip to the store
Have everyone else get sick, too
Wake Mom up five times every hour in the middle of the night with your ailments

Top Things To Do When Mom is Sick:
Have Dad bring dinner on his way home from work (thanks, Dear!)
Children play nicely with each other
Keep the decibel level low
Bring her orange juice and toast
Do your chores without needing to be asked
Let Mom watch Pride and Prejudice without grumping for a violent action flick
Keep the house clean

Bahahaha!  I'm laughing so hard I think I might have one of those nasty coughing attacks!  You know, the ones where you cough until your eyes water and you can't breathe anymore and you are afraid you'll cough up a lung or two.  One of those.  Quick!  Bring me some bon bons!  I'm in the hammock under the palm trees.

DIY Mess

While I have been sitting and rocking my sick Freddie, I've been doing a little too much of surfing and blog-reading.  Sometimes I will read home blogs and get discouraged - sometimes inspired.  Been getting a little too much John and Sherry this time, I think.

As I was sitting ans sitting and rocking, I spent a lot of time looking at my house, and noticing all those things that I mean to get around to sometime, but usually don't, and then I see those things so often that I don't see them anymore.  Ya know what I mean?  Well, I started noticing them again while I was sitting.  And folks, we have a missionary send-off party that will be happening here in not a whole big heap of time, so maybe I ought to start addressing a few of those issues.

Here's my list, to remind myself (because I usually jot things down on a bit of scratch paper that gets lost and tossed into the recycle bin) of things I would like to get done in the next couple of months:

finally finish fixing dining room ceiling
fix light over stairs that won't turn on
fix back doorbell so it actually rings
pretty up front porch
pretty up back patio
pretty up lower patio (we have two patios, which I love until they collect junk - and they are good at collecting junk!)
stain coffee table a darker color
stain mantel a darker color
update family room picture shelves
update family photos in living room (yeah, we took the pictures, but I never printed or hung them!)
clean out the rec room (again)
take out the kitchen cabinets above the stove (dreaming!)
clean out sun room (which involves a lot of organizing and purging my craft stashes)
get a couple more bookshelves to hold our book hoardings collections
organize the office
paint the kitchen (more dreaming!)
make new valance for family room sliding door (if I paint the kitchen because then the current one won't match anymore)
tidy the garage enough to walk through without fear of bodily damage
reduce the "used car lot" feel of our front yard
landscape the front yard we scraped last spring (or at least de-junk it)
sell/give away unused desk
sell/give away two unused dressers
sell/give away unused tv
sell/give away outgrown toddler bed

That should do for now.

And I thought, as I was putting these sick little little sweeties to bed, that I would just jump on one of these projects and git 'er done.  Here is my awesome coffee table, which the kids love to do their homework on because the top lifts up and locks like a giant TV table.  I partially roughed it up with some coarse sandpaper, because that's what the stain said you needed to do.  I had to go over a few areas more to get out some long scratches that happened while the table was in storage.

See the dark scratch?  It has a few friends and they drive Trent crazy.  So I'm doing him a favor, besides de-orange-ify-ing the whole thing.  After some hard work and making my hands look deformed like the crazed arthritic witch from Snow White, I was ready to re-stain the top.  I made sure there was plenty of ventilation, because the stain was very stinky.  Wipe on, wipe off.  Easy.  And it looks great.

It looks great if you like a very slightly darker orange color with dull brownish skid marks where I took out the scratches, that is.  And one of the scratches is still there.  So now I have more work to do to get it back to a presentable state.  And this time, I can't just ignore it as something that would-be-nice to get done, because it looks bad.  Really bad.

And that, my friends, is how to make your own mess.  Our house still stinks.

Febrile Seizures

I raised 5 boys and had no idea what a febrile seizure looked like.  I knew what it was - rare.  So I didn't worry about it.  Then along came my second batch of kids, and I learned.

Not long after Angel tried to fly out the window, cracked her skull to pieces, stayed in the hospital, got put back together, came home, and recovered...  Whew.  That was an ordeal.  an now I can sum it all up in a single awkward sentence?  You can read all about our miracle here.  Anyway, after all that, I was driving the boys home from school when one of them told me that Angel was shaking in her car seat.  We were almost home, so I pulled in the driveway before turning to look at her.  She was having a seizure.  Scared all the bejeebies out of me.

I hauled her in the house and laid her out on the couch.  She was still jerking and I just tried to keep her from falling or hitting anything.  When it was over, we did some quick research.  Grateful that we have so many answers at our fingertips!  A febrile seizure is a whole-body shaking episode that occurs when a fever rises quickly.  It has much less to do with the actual temperature of the fever as it does with how fast it comes on.  And yeah, it's a full-out seizure: eyes rolling back, jaw clenched, spasms jerking, limbs twitching, lips turning blue.  It can be really scary.  Happily, I've never been a panic-in-an-emergency kind of gal, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to scream every now and then.  I just don't, is all.

Due to Angel's recent head trauma, I wanted to take her in to the doctor.  I called our regular doc, and they directed us to the urgent care clinic.  It was a bit of a drive, and a long, long wait once we got there.  An exercise in frustration, really, since after a long, long, really long wait in the examining room where we had to wait extra to get second and third opinions from doctors who must have been called in from the golf course to check our little girl - they sent us to the emergency room after all.

More waiting, and more waiting, of course.  That's what an emergency room is all about.  By the time we were actually seen, Angel was fine, the fever had subsided, and she was climbing the walls like a monkey in captivity.  We learned that febrile seizures were not a bad thing - they just happen to some kids.  And if they have one, their chances of having another were greater, but kids usually outgrow them by about age 5.

Since then, Angel and Georgie have both had a couple more seizures.  On vacation, no less.  But Freddie was spared, until this week.  Welcome to the club, little Fred.

I've spent the past few days just holding my little guy.  He's been feverish and coughing, just not feeling well and wanting his mama.  I've been sitting so much that Angel even called me on it yesterday.  "Mom!  You are just sitting, sitting, sitting!  It is not healthy for you.  You should get up and do something!"

I'd love to, dear.  I have medicines I need to refill at the pharmacy, and I need to go grocery shopping to refill our Mother Hubbard cupboards.  The chickens are running out of food, too.  And I have lots of things I'd like to get done.

But until my baby gets feeling better, I'm just going to sit and rock him.  That's what mamas do.

How to Set Dishes on the Counter

During the day, it's my job to do the dishes.  The older boys are all at school or at work, and I'm home with the three little ones.  If the dishes are going to get done, it's up to me.  Some days I just let the breakfast, lunch, then snack dishes pile up on the counter, knowing that whoever is on for dinner dishes will take care of them.  Some days are not conducive to dishes-doing.

But most days, I like to get the breakfast dishes going and smile happily at my clean kitchen.  It doesn't stay that way, so I have to smile quickly.  If the dishwasher is full, I like to run it immediately because 1) the dishes get cleaner if they don't sit in their gunk for a long time; 2) then the dishwasher can be unloaded and ready for more dishes; and 3) because Trent and I have differing opinions on the proper way to load a dishwasher and if I get it run and emptied he will never know.  We make allowances for each other like that.  Unknowingly.

Angel has become a good little helper for me, and thinks it is fun to unload a dishwasher.  We want to encourage that delirium.  She takes out the utensils and piles them in an orderly-to-a-five-year-old assemblage in the silverware drawer.  She carefully stacks plates and bowls on the counter, waiting for a person of greater height to place them on the shelves.  Then she dances like crazy about the kitchen, narrowly missing several collisions with the cupboards, gleefully proud of herself.

If the dishwasher is empty, then I can, with a clean conscience, ask the boys to load their own dishes from after-school snacks.  And the counters stay clean!  In theory.  And during the week.  All the order in the universe shifts on the weekends.

I walked into the kitchen late Saturday afternoon to see that, while the dishwasher was running, someone had made a peanut butter sandwich.  Instead of opening the quietly sloshing dishwasher and adding the peanut buttery knife to the already-in-progress load, that someone had placed the knife on the counter to the right of the sink.  I'm ok with that. But later, someone had made a ham and cheese sandwich, and neatly placed the mayonnaise knife and the cheese slicer next to the peanut buttery knife.  Lined up like a dozen tin soldiers were a butter-and-toast-crumb knife, a spoon from an illicit ice cream robbery and three of his guilty friends, a pickle fork, a fork from leftover spaghetti, another butter-and-toast-crumb knife, and a spoon from hot chocolate happily making a miniature hot chocolate pool on the counter.  After this police lineup were a few plates and bowls and cups, each needing to have it's very own space on the counter.  No sharing or stacking for me, thankyouverymuch.  I was amazed at how the parade extended past the sink area, past the dishwasher, and extended all the way down the counter before making a neat turn toward the stove.

Memo to children and others living in this domicile:  If you are going to go through all the trouble to place each utensil exactly parallel and equidistant to the one previous, and line all the dishes up in perfect marching band formation, at least play some Sousa while you do it!

 Or maybe just stack the dishes?

Missionary Shopping

I had a date with Alec.  I had it all scheduled with the older school boys that they were to watch the small fry and get their chores done independently while Alec and I went off to do some shopping.  We were going to get the things he needed for his mission.

There is quite a list of things.  Things.  Alec needs to take with him.  Things you take for granted until you have to pack for a two-year trip and you can only take two suitcases and a carry-on bag.  And all those Things have to last and fit and work without failing.

A suit, of course.  Belts and ties and 10-14 pairs of socks.  I think I might own 3 or 4 pair, but I'm not a sock person.  Or a shoe person.  But I digress.  Lots of white shirts and a bunch of dress pants and waterproof winter boots and a good coat with a zip-out liner and sturdy walking shoes and towels and a sewing kit and gloves and an umbrella.  I might have missed a few things.

So we sat down to plan our strategy, Alec and I.  I had recently chatted with a Very Smart Mother who is our neighbor (we are so lucky!) and has a son who just got home from a mission and another son who is currently serving.  She gave me some recommendations on stores to go to and brands that were sturdy and stores we might want to skip.  I relayed these comments to Alec, and we headed to the computer to do a preliminary comparison of prices, just so we would know what we were getting into.

We opened lots of tabs on our browser, comparing back and forth... and then we found a sale.  A sale with white shirts marked more than half off.  A sale with buy-one-get-one-free.  A sale with free shipping.  And before I knew it, the mother-son bonding trip I had so been looking forward to had turned into me looking over his shoulder as he clicked scrolled and added things to his shopping cart.  Mostly, he shopped and I fielded all the normal random questions and concerns from the rest of the children.  Not a shopping trip.  Not one-on-one.  Not bonding.

Sigh.  But really, what is the important thing?  That we are getting the things that he needs.  And that I love him.  And he loves me back.  So proud of this boy.  So proud of the man is is growing into.  I'll love him forever (even if he doesn't want me to sometimes).