The weekend before last I babysat our friend's three year old. He is a splendid little guy, but he also was sniffley and coughed in my face at random intervals.
While I babysat him, I also was tending to my down for the count daughter, who navigated her cold like an Arctic explorer, head on and with copious amounts of soup.
Then, a couple of days later, in spite of mainlining all manner of whole foods and supplements, my son succumbed right in the middle of basketball tryouts.
And still, I did not heed the call. I steeled my mind and body against it, I did not want to get sick.
All of the kids weren't sick for long, about three days total, with some lingering sniffles. However, while podcasting with my crew Sunday, I noticed that I felt a bit, meh.
By the following morning I was fully in the grasp of a congestion symphony. My ears were on fire, my sinus cavities were more packed than the 405 during a Cali rush hour, and my throat felt like I had bathed its lining in a Carolina Reaper pepper cocktail.
Sigh.
The thing is, when you have a homestead, you really don't get a day off. I am in the process of reducing the amount of souls I have to tend too, but I still have ducks, pigs, a steer, cats, dogs, oh yes, and a hubs and two teenagers.
That means every day there are waterers to check, animals and humans to feed, meetings to attend, laundry to do, and the list goes on. Like all moms who are struck with a full on immune battle onslaught, I knew I needed to rest, but it's just so dang hard.
Part of the problem is I just knew if I sat down, I wouldn't want to get up. So I did my best to ingest quality food stuffs, mainlined a lot of herbal tea, and requested frequent mood stabilizing hugs from the hubs.
Even though for the past 48 hours I have felt like what comes out of the back end of my steer, I soldiered on and had a fairly optimistic outlook as I thought I was beating the stuff.
Until 3:17 AM last night.
I awoke and bolted upright like a dog who touched their nose to an electric fence. I am not going to go into the mucus-tinged details of the nose-flowing, throat-burning awfulness that followed for the next couple of hours, suffice it to say that I was miserable and could have used an inflatable kayak. Or something.
Anyway, I survived the flare up of said immune system vs. contagion battle and finally passed back out around 6AM. One nice thing about having teenagers is that I don't have to get up and get them off to school, they are completely self-sufficient in that department, and the hubs, knowing that I am off my Kat game, has been feeding the critters the past couple of days, so as I drifted back into a sick slumber, I thought to myself, maybe I will just rest a bit.
Nope. You see, we have two dogs and about nine cats that hang out in the house. I don't let any critter in my bedroom save my Cowboy Corgi, Cora, mainly because she sleeps for twelve hours a night without moving (I admire her commitment to slumber). However, we refer to her as the Emotional Support Corgi, because she has this intuitive ability to know when something is wrong.
And apparently my current lack of internal homeostasis really bugs her, because she started talking up a storm at about 8AM and woke me up, nosing me like I was dead.
To be fair, I am usually up and giving her breakfast way before that time, so I get it.
But the weird pet behavior didn't stop there. As I shuffled out to my nook next to the woodstove, wrapped in a fleece blanket like a plague ridden burrito of misery, I soon found myself covered in the Corgi and kittens.
My daughter's big German Shepherd Hound mix sat and stared at me with a look of concern.
*It's okay," I told them in a craggy tone, "I'm only partially dying."
Apparently none of them liked that answer, for then the Corgi threw herself upon me like a errant baguette and another cat tried to crowd onto my lap.
"This is getting ridiculous," I murmured.
The hubs came in with an armload of wood, took one look at my pet covered form, and started laughing at me. (He does this a lot, like daily. I'm offended).
He removed the excess critters, gave me a hug and a steaming hot cup of coffee, and told me to "Just sit there and rest."
"I'm trying!" I whined like a petulant influencer who didn't get a free meal just for existing.
He looked at me with his eyebrows aloft, in that amused way he always does, and at that moment, as if to prove my point, Yaga, Munchkin, and Peaches all jumped into my lap.
I sighed, blew my nose, and leaned back against my chair. Perhaps with plugged ears and insulated by concerned pets I would not be able to hear the call for much longer...
And on that note, I am going to try to go rest now, hope you are all healthy, happy, and realtively excess mucus-free!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's never congested but on occasion a tad sluggish iPhone.