She's wicked sick with croup. Her fever is down to 101.3 now and I'm hoping it continues to decline overnight. We spent the night on the couch together last night because she was crouping and whooping. Her cough seemed to improve in the colder temperatures.
We figured fresh air would do us all good today so even though it was freezing outside we went hiking. Kate was overly bundled in three hats and a snowsuit and she mostly slept on Daddy as we walked, but Dylan kept falling in the snow and by the time we walked the mile and a half through the woods he was frozen and having the time of his life.
We hiked on a nature trail and there were these little stops along the way to educate us on which trees we were looking at, what bugs inhabit them, how a forest decomposes, and the like. Dylan loved learning about everything in the woods. By the end of the hike we were really cold and wanted to skip past reading each paragraph and Dylan stopped at each one to attempt to read it.
A friend of mine passed away this weekend from complications of surgery. My grief has taken two paths and I have felt sad as often as I have been furious. This friend of mine lost both her mother and father within the last two months and she has been fighting through visits to the ICU and bile leaking from her stomach, surgeries, suffering. For months. I joked with her that 2014 will be her year, that things had to get better after watching her mother suffer from cancer, only to lose her dad two weeks later to a heart attack. I just talked to her on Thursday night and she was gone by Saturday morning. She's supposed to be hanging out with my cousin tomorrow. I am heartbroken.
So we're sick around here. I just now put down the blog for two hours and went up to the kids' room where I held Kate while she cried and cried until she no longer had a cry in her and she sounded like a baby sheep trying to make any sort of noise to let me know that she didn't feel well. And I want to sit down and pity myself because I've been miserably sick for two weeks with my thyroid stuff and now I'm coming down with the kids' cold or virus or whatever this is, and I haven't truly slept in as long as I can remember. But instead I'm feeling desperate. I want to hold my family close and never ever let them go. Love is fragile, you know. So I'll take baby steps. Tomorrow Kate will wake up feeling a bit better. Dylan will feel better. We will heal. But darned if I don't hold them tighter as I think about my sweet friend.