An Unwelcome Visitor: the Flu

 

Sorry it’s been awhile since my last post – the flu decided to pay our household a visit.  It all started on Sunday night when we came home from a family gathering celebrating my grandfather’s 88^th birthday.  Aaron and I were both feeling a bit run down, but I sat down at my computer to type out a blog post and compose my thoughts for the coming week.  But then my head started spinning.  I rested my head on my cool desk and closed my eyes for a bit.  Next thing I knew it was five minutes later and my forehead had beads of sweat forming on it.  I took my temperature, and sure enough, I had a fever (as I mentioned in my post about Guinevere’s first fever, it takes a lot for me to even break 98 degrees).  So I went to bed without posting anything (for the record, that would-be post can be summed up like this: my grandpa is awesome and it was great seeing everyone).

The next morning I woke up not feeling great, but I thought maybe if I got dressed and went into work, I could power through the day.  By 9:30am, I realized that was not going to happen.  So I wrapped up everything that had to be done that day, said goodbye to my co-workers and headed home.  When I got home, Aaron was laying on the couch making groaning noises.  He, too, had a fever.  By that afternoon, we both realized we had the full-blown flu.  (I guess the one silver lining is that it helped me lose those last three pounds of baby-weight.)

Our biggest concern was Guinevere.  If we both had the flu, how would we take care of our baby?  Fortunately, Aaron’s mom recently moved to Southern California and was willing to make the drive to visit for a bit and help us with the baby. I am going to take a moment here to state how amazing my mother-in-law is!  She definitely does not fall into the stereotypical overbearing in-law category.  She came up here, exposed herself to our germs, disinfected our house, did laundry, made us soup, helped us with the baby, and kept a cheery disposition the entire time! 

This flu that is one of the most contagious bugs I have ever encountered!  It turns out that of about 12 people at my grandfather’s birthday gathering, at least 9 of us were sick in the next couple days.  You might be thinking food poisoning, which went through my head too, aside from the fact that I had other non-food poisoning symptoms (congestion, etc.).  But then, within 2 days of being here, Aaron’s mom came down with the flu too!  The craziest thing about this flu is that it ends almost as quickly as it starts.  Usually when I get sick, there’s a bunch of lingering symptoms (sore throat, congestion, cough, etc,) that last for days after the fever and icky symptoms are gone.  But aside from a bit of a stuffy, nose, I feel totally fine now.

So far, Guinevere seems ok.  She’s a little congested, but I don’t think that has anything to do with our illnesses.  She’s had a stuffy nose practically since birth.  I’m still being paranoid about making sure I wash my hands before touching her.  I’m also starting a new regimen of wiping down surfaces that we touch on a nightly basis, just to be safe.  The Lysol will definitely be getting more use, too, as I spray down fabric things like the couch every night.  Honestly, maybe I needed this illness to get me into some good cleaning habits before Guinevere starts crawling and getting into everything. 

In other news, it’s finally cooled down enough for us to use some of Guinevere’s “winter” clothes (I put “winter” in quotation marks because around here, anything colder than 65 is “winter”).  Other than that, I’m looking forward to a nice relaxing, rainy weekend.

Ready for a rainy day.

All snugly for a cool night.