The Moo & Her Goo

My poor baby girl is suffering.

Miss Moo has the chicken pox at least as bad as her brother did, and worse in some respects. There are pox in some VERY delicate places - I’ve never seen anything like it. And her gorgeous little face is a mess. She looks like she’s got the mange!

So far, we’ve only had one really bad night. During the night after my birthday (Friday), she was severely itchy and just couldn’t go to sleep no matter what we tried. She lay awake in bed for hours in silence (she is adamant she never slept) and when we checked on her at 1:30 she just took one look at us and bawled her little guts out. Her Daddy sat up with her and watched a movie, and they finally made it to bed around 3am Saturday morning.

She woke again at 4:30.

It was my turn, so I gave her a baking soda bath and lay with her until she finally dozed off again. Folks, I watched the sun rise. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. You don’t see much through sleep-deprived eye slits.

And then I promptly took myself back to bed.

We let her sleep very late that day and in the meantime, I popped down to the local chemist (drugstore) and picked up the other seventeen ‘itchy skin’ products I didn’t get when Master J was sick the week before. No, not really, but I did allow a dubiously-efficient pharmacist to suggest children’s Zyrtec because he said an antihistamine would help with the itchies. It actually seemed to do the trick because last night, she slept through. Phew.

But my goodness, she looks horrible! She’s at that ‘third day stage’ where she looks worse than Day 1 because everything is bursting and starting to scab and change colour and the pox have peaked in number. She makes me scratch just looking at her! And there are, uh, cleansing issues that she needs help with given where the pox are situated, the poor thing. I really hope she comes good in the same timeframe that J did - it was really only a week between his first spots and when he was all scabbed-over (ie, non-contagious). But at least no missed school for Moo :)

It’s daylight savings here from today - threw my whole day out of whack. Talented Hubby gave me a sleep in - sweet, sweet man - and with the time change I was eating breakfast at lunchtime, very strange. It’s also a public holiday in my state tomorrow (Labour Day) and the grocery store, which I hit at fifteen-minutes-before-closing for a couple of things (big, big mistake - was in the checkout line for 25 minutes!) was the busiest I’ve seen it outside of the Christmas holiday period. It was insane! As with all public holidays, they start to wheedle back the amount of stock on the shelves over the course of the day before, so you’re usually hard-pressed to find the full range of meat or bread, which can be frustrating. On the other hand, if you time it right, you can pick up meat and bakery items super-cheap. I got half price loaves of bread today, but missed out on the beef mince (ground beef) I needed. So half and half.

We’re all a bit cabin-feverish round here at the moment. We had only a week between J being non-contagious and Moo getting spotty and half of that time was taken up with a visit from cousins and Daddy’s usual work week, so we haven’t had much of a chance to do anything these school holidays. The kids are frustrated (as am I…sigh). Normally, I’d take them out for a Special Mummy Day - cinema, lunch out, window shopping etc - but we have had to settle for a couple of trips to Blockbuster instead. God bless weekly rentals - without which my life would be a whimpering mess of pox ointment, bald patches (my own) and scabs (theirs), LOL.