Albuterol and amoxicillin and z-packs, Oh my!

Can I just say how very much I love the winter months? Sliding around on the ice, freezing while walking to the mailbox.... Your shoes filling up with slushy snow and the wind whipping straight to the bone.... Not to mention the very best part of the winter months, the never ending colds!

This season has been one of the worst ones yet for our household. Normally, Punk gets his deep winter cough and we might have a few small assorted colds pass through the house but nothing too major. This doesn't seem to be the case this year.

Right after Thanksgiving (like the very next day), I came down with the worst sore throat of my life. The only time that it has been even comparable has been when I have had too much iodine in my system. We are guessing that it started because hubby was nice enough to share his "cold" with me and it just morphed out of control. Since that point, every single member of our family (with the exception of Punk, go figure) has decided that they needed to have this bug.

Oh the joys of winter!

Last week, we took PorkChop to the doctor over his cough. She also was nice enough to check SweetPea out at the same time even though she didn't officially have an appointment. Today it was Peanut's turn. She woke for school at 7am, literally howling about her ear hurting. I figured that it was more of a case of the "I don't want to attend school" blues and ended up fighting with her for more than an hour. But she refused to get out of bed, preferring to keep screaming. I even took her temperature to make sure that she was fine (and she was fever free). Checked SweetPea to make sure that the thermometer was working... apparently it was because SweetPea WAS running a fever. So I caved and told her to go back to bed that she could stay home.

After listening to two and a half straight hours of crying, I made her an appointment to get checked. Good thing too that they could squeeze us in (thank God for cancellations!) because her ear wasn't just "sore" but severely infected. The doctor couldn't believe that we had had zero warning about it because of the shape it was in. Peanut now has a follow-up appt in ten days to make sure that the ear drum doesn't rupture and if it does, that its healing ok. Fun!

All totaled for this month, that makes two infected ears (both on Peanut's head), one child on breathing treatments for a junky cough without an apparent cause, one child that has been consistently running a low grade fever also without an apparent cause, two adults battling headaches (which we are thinking are being brought on by sinuses), one teen boy with a man cold and the other almost teen boy who went to bed early tonight because he was "too tired" to finish watching a movie with the family. Definitely doesn't bode well right now for our "healthy" family member.