We took another weekend trip, this time to Cleveland. We had a really good time; we stayed in a hotel with a pool, and we went to the Cleveland Zoo, the science center, the natural history museum, and the children's museum. The only bad part about the weekend was that toward the end of it, Ethan started getting really sick. At first he just felt a little warm, and he was really cranky, but it was really hot out (we haven't had much of a fall here this year) and he'd of course been up late in the hotel room the night before, so we didn't know for sure if he was really getting sick or if he was just overheated and tired. Well, he was getting sick. When we got home and got his temperature taken, it was over 103, and he just kept getting sicker. On Monday I took him to the doctor and they did a strep test, which came back negative, so they figured it was a virus and the doctor gave him a steroid prescription to open his lungs, and she told me to keep him hydrated and full of advil. By Thursday morning, his temperature was still high, and his throat was hurting so bad and he was so miserable that he had stopped drinking anything, and he even resisted taking any medicine. (He would just cough it right back up.) I called back the doctor but they couldn't see him until the next day, and I didn't think Ethan should wait that long, so I took him to the Children's Close to Home center. They looked at him for just a couple minutes, looked at his throat, and felt his tummy and said he needed to go downtown to the hospital right away. They wanted to transport him in the ambulance, but I thought that would terrify him pretty badly, so I promised to take him right there. The doctors figured he had mono, which is what Natalie had at age three. He needed to get an IV to get re-hydrated.  Well, they ended up admitting him because he was so sick. The poor little guy stayed in the hospital, in the communicable disease wing, until Saturday afternoon. It was really stressful to have him in there. I realized then, that it is SO much harder to be in the hospital when it is your child in that bed and not you... all last week, even though Ethan came home and was acting pretty much back to normal within a day or so, Phil and I took most of the week to recover. It was just really emotionally tiring. The first night there, I stayed with Ethan. (And Ella too - we had to get special permission to keep her there since she's a breastfed baby.) My mom came out the next day and helped out with watching over Natalie (who couldn't be on the floor at all), and Phil had a CLE he had to go to the whole day. Then on Friday night, Phil stayed with Ethan while I took the girls home to sleep. When I came back the next morning, Phil told me that he thought his fever had broken over the night. Sure enough, by mid morning he was eating a LITTLE again, and at least drinking enough that they said he could go home soon. (On Friday, he refused to drink ANYTHING, even chocolate milk. He kept saying that he just wanted "home milk". The nurses kept thinking he said "whole milk", but he wanted nothing to drink from the hospital!) Friday was a particularly bad day all around, though. He was really miserable, and was screaming and crying. When I tried to hold him, he just screamed more. One thing did help, though, which I really thank the nurse aide for. You would think that the IV was the most bothersome to him, but it wasn't. He kept insisting that the little red light that was wrapped around his finger to track his heart rate and oxygen levels was hurting him. I took it off him several times, put it on different fingers, on his toes, even on MY finger to show him that IT DOESN'T HURT (it's just a light wrapped in a fabric band-aid) but he just screamed all the more. A nurse aide came in and said the same thing happened with one of her grandsons. She thought it was probably the red light which lit up their finger, that equaled "pain" and "boo boo" in their minds. So she took it off, stuck it on the bottom of his foot, where he couldn't see it, and then covered THAT with a normal band-aid. And that's all it took -- he calmed right down, his heart rate came down from being at alarming levels, and he was able to fall asleep finally.

Natalie had a good time at the hospital, though. They have a siblings play area there where she was able to go to for an hour and a half at a time, twice a day. (It was REALLY helpful, let me tell you!) She had a blast there. She did all kinds of art work, and she got several beanie baby bears to take home too. As we were leaving on Saturday afternoon, she was happy to see Ethan again, and she said to him, "The hospital was FUN, wasn't it, Ethan?" Ethan just shook his head "no". 

There's lots more I could write about, including two months of month-birthdays for Ella (she's ELEVEN months now!), and an update on homeschooling now that we're ten weeks in (it's going REALLY well!) but I'm going to have to save that for another time. 

We live a pretty scheduled life around here these days (which is funny thinking how we were around here when it was just Natalie and me!) and it's time to head back upstairs for read-aloud time and then naps for Ethan and Ella. We read a long chapter book (an additional one from the homeschool curriculum) every afternoon before nap. We just finished Charlotte's Web last week, and right now we're reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I'm going to make sure my kids know the BOOK version of all my favorite stories!