Strep Throat!

Well it's not yet 9:00 pm, and Paul is in bed. For most of our marriage that was completely unheard of because he is by nature a night owl. It has happened more often the past five months because of how early he gets up in the morning for work. Today he actually went to bed around 4:00 pm. I was so surprised to see him home that early and then found out he wasn't feeling well. At 6:00 I went up to check on him, and after I felt his forehead I knew he had a fever. I checked it and it registered 103.5! He just asked for more ibuprofen, but I said I was calling the doctor. Paul often gets respiratory viruses, but he almost never has a fever of any type even when he has the same bug others of us have and for the rest of us it includes a fever. I think in 15 years of marriage he's probably had 2 fevers beside this one so it really caught my attention. Thankfully they agreed to squeeze him in at 6:30 even though they didn't actually have any available appointments. He tested positive for strep throat and got an antibiotic at CVS and then went back to bed. Hopefully he'll be feeling better in a couple of days, and I'm praying that the rest of us don't catch it from him. I had strep throat many, many times as a child before I had my tonsils taken out, and so I know it is very painful!


Over the past several months my bedtime has shifted as well. I would not call myself a night owl, but I am staying up later than I have for most of my life. I remember being teased in college by my roommates for how early I went to bed even on a Friday or Saturday night. For decades I went to bed sometime between 9-10pm (9:30 being the most common) and usually got up at 6:00 am. I very rarely in my life was awake past midnight. At slumber parties I was the first one to sleep. I never stayed up late to do school work (except in the summer of 1992 while taking some graduate classes at Liberty because the course was completed in only five days). Well on Monday night I actually stayed up until 12:20 am. Of course as a mom I have been up at weird hours far more than the first 35 years of my life because of nursing babies during the night, but it was very odd for me to stay awake that late. I was working on a large order for Shutterfly. If I had more stamina I could have gotten a little bit more stuff without paying any more money, but I decided I needed to get to bed. I forgot though that when I stay up past

my usual bedtime that I often have a hard time going to sleep (that second wind translates to insomnia) so it was well past 1:00 am before I got to sleep. Thankfully the night before that I had gone to bed at 8:30 and slept for 10 hours straight. My typical bedtime though has been more like 10:00-10:30 lately, which means that often Paul is now going to bed before me, which is the reverse of what was true for the first almost 15 years of our marriage. I would have laughed if someone had told me that at some point in the future Paul would often go to bed before I did considering for many years he was usually up more than 3 hours later than me, but things have changed.

Ian actually slept past 6:30 this morning, which meant I had to wake him up. I never like waking any of my kids up, but I particularly don't like waking Ian because usually he wakes up earlier than I wish he would. I asked Paul to have the kids go to bed in what they were going to wear today when he put them to bed last night (while I was at Bible study), and I woke them up at 6:45 this morning so we could be out the door at 7:00. I

had three blueberry English muffins on plates for them to eat in the van on the way to Hershey. We participated in a Homeschool Day at the museum in Hershey as well as the chocolate lab. It was very interesting. They had different scavenger hunt papers depending on the age of the child to help them get more out of the museum. In the "chocolate workers wanted" section we learned about different jobs. Two of my kids picked the "knock-out department" (they liked banging the hammer to get the hershey bars out of the molds) which paid 9 cents per hour, and one child (plus myself) picked the wrapping department, which paid 10 cents per 5 pound box of Kisses wrapped. There was no way any of us were going to pick "refining department" as that bathtub on wheels was very hard to push around. It was heavy! Then after our two hours at the museum I drove the kids to Chocolate World so they could do the free ride and eat their little Hershey bar at the end. They had to wait until after they ate their lunch in the van to eat the chocolate bar they made in the lab. We all discovered that cacao nibs are very bitter to eat.

I am so very far behind in editing pictures. I never finished the ones from Edaville, and I haven't even begun to look at the ones I took on the last day of our trip (Saturday). I did include a few from today's field trip in this post as well as three videos. Two videos are from my phone on our whale cruise. After only trying to take pictures (with my good camera) it hit me that videos were probably the better choice. In hindsight I wish I had brought along our video camera, but these two are better than nothing. It was an amazing cruise! The first video deserves a "drum roll please" moment because it's the very first time I ever recorded a video of Ian playing the piano. He is really enjoying it! Nadia played her Happy Birthday song on Tuesday via FaceTime for their cousin Micah in Turkey who turned two that day. They didn't practice the piano today due to our field trip, but tomorrow will be a regular school day as the only time we plan on leaving the house is for soccer practice tomorrow night, which was also the case on Tuesday. After a busy day I like having a day to stay home most or all of the day.