The Return of the Porcine Malaise

On Thursday, I received the Call From Daycare that every mother dreads: COME PICK UP YOUR CHILD. SHE'S THROWING UP. I arrived to find my little girl looking pale and scared, her head in the toilet, crying because she thought she had done something bad. The only time that child has ever vomited was once when she was still a baby and had a coughing fit right after a big bottle of milk. She's never had a stomach virus and most of her colds have been fairly mild, at least on the Harper Scale of Illness Severity. Harper was sick constantly as a baby and a toddler, nothing but fevers and barfing and diarrhea and snot and coughs, though of course now she's the healthiest one of us all. Devon has had one ear infection and a few mild colds, but nothing that made me worry.

And this looked like it was going to turn out much the same. She threw up once more after we got home, and after that she was fine. Her usual ornery, kickin' butt and takin' names self.

Then on Saturday afternoon she started looking listless and feeling kind of warm. Then she had a big poop and everything was fine again. Well, honestly, wouldn't that perk you up?

Sunday she woke up in a great mood, but within a few hours the listlessness and slight fever had returned. By that afternoon, it was clear she had a good fever going and she didn't feel like doing much of anything. Clearly a big poop was not going to help matters.

Yesterday, her fever increased, she barely moved, and her chest and head were getting congested. I took her to the doctor, where her fever promptly broke while we were in the waiting room, and while a check of her ears and nose found no infection (which had been my guess) a quick swab of her snot and one mysterious lab test showed she has the flu. I heard the doctor announcing in the hallway before she came in to tell me, "Well, we've got our first confirmed case of Influenza A." It may have been the first case in that office, but clearly it had hit everywhere else, because we were unable to fill a prescription for Tamiflu within the 48-hour window when it would be effective. All sold out.

Naturally, not only did I neglect to get her vaccinated yet (and it may not have helped since one other kid at her daycare has it and he did get a flu shot), I also have not been inoculated myself, so I am a Ticking Time Bomb of Viral Pestilence. David and Harper are covered, which makes them all smug and superior.

OH. AND THEN. Harper brings home a note from school that says one of her classmates has head lice. I had to put my head between my knees. Next, it'll be some sort of carpet piranha infestation. Or David will tell me he has the clap.

But while my sweetie languished on my sewing room sofa over the weekend, I decided to finally come to grips with the Problem of What Quilt Design To Use for the Heather Ross Mendocino fabric I acquired over a year ago, and which I had intended to use for a quilt for one of my nieces. I went through all of my quilting magazines and came up with a pattern I thought would work. It turned out to be extremely easy and fast to put together, even with the circles (that still need to be sewn on - right now they're glued). The pale solid squares were supposed to match the peachy background of the circles, but they don't achieve that as much as I had hoped. I still need two borders and I will have to buy more fabric for that and decide what colors to do there.

Now that I have accomplished that, AND completed my two articles for the next issue of Quilter's Home, I am at my leisure to become grossly and extravagantly ill. I am sure that if I do indeed become the Camille of Quilt Blog Land, my subsequent descriptions of it will cause somebody to write me a huffy email about how PHLEGM IS NOT FUNNY. And that itself will be entertaining enough to make all that phlegm totally worth it.