A pox on your house!

Chicken pox, that is.

You want an example of how things work in our lives?

Last Wednesday, I was sitting in the backyard with a friend, and we started chatting about vaccines. For many reasons I won't go into here, the girls have been partially vaccinated, and the boys haven't had any. So we were chatting about various vaccines and I told her that we had basically made up our minds that if the girls hadn't had the chicken pox by the time they were twelve, I'd probably just vaccinate them so that they weren't completely miserable when they got it.

The next morning, Abby came into my room. "Mom, I think I have the chicken pox."

Bleary-eyed, I answered, "You don't have the chicken pox, Abby. You didn't have a fever. Chicken pox always starts with a fever." (In my defense, it was first thing in the morning. I could hardly remember my own name, let alone diagnose an illness.) "You have some red bumps, You're probably allergic to something. Here's some benadryl."

Later that day, after rounds of claritin and benadryl didn't help, the spots kept spreading, and I was forced to turn to Dr. Google.

Sure enough, those spots looked suspiciously like chicken pox.

I started laughing. Because what else was I going to do?

Then I called Morgan, to tell her that my children had exposed her children to chicken pox, and beg her to still be my friend even though if her kids contracted chicken pox it would be when she was approximately 38 weeks pregnant. (So far, she's still talking to me. But we haven't passed the 2-week incubation period yet.)

Then I emailed photos to Abby's pediatrician after speaking to them and having them tell me, in no uncertain terms, that they were NOT interested in seeing her in the office.

Sure enough, my family somehow, somewhere managed to contract chicken pox.

Ashlynn started with the spots that night. As far as two cases of chicken pox go, they were both very mild. They took a few baths, itched for a while, and complained about being cooped up in the house without friends.

Now the girls have recovered, and there's no sign of spots on the boys. Which is super weird, because if there's a virus, a bug, a sniffle, they're going to catch it, love it, make it their own. So we're waiting for another set of itchy, red spots on another set of kidlets. 


Figures that since we haven't seen the pediatrician since February that it would be something big, rare and obnoxious.