Hi, all. I can’t believe it’s December, guys. The last few weeks have been an insane blur of SICKNESS in the SophiaKSays household. I left you all off on the last blog post with a little update about A having pink eye. Well, turns out that pink eye was only the beginning.

First, we had pink eye/super mild cold with A over Veterans Day weekend. She was home sick for a few days and managed to make it back to school just in time for her class Friendship Feast on the last day before Thanksgiving break. I was happy she was healthy enough in time for this feast because it was a join feast with their class big buddies and her big buddy class this year happens to be D’s class. So both of my kids were celebrating their Friendship Feast together!

Then we were on Thanksgiving break and as someone who works in a school now, having those glorious 9 days off work was something I was SUPERBLY looking forward to. I had such fun plans to do our annual traditions, such as the North Pole breakfast, Christmas tree cutting/decorating, Christmas movie nights, etc. I had play dates lined up for all my kids AND we had reservations to take them to the House of Prime Rib for the very first time too … it was just going to be a super fun, festive 9 days.

We kicked off Thanksgiving break by taking our kids to watch Frozen on BroadwaySF. What a memory it was to get to treat them to this show! A kept trying to mimic the performers and dance along with them/sing along with them. Her eyes were like this the whole time 🤩 D & E were sitting behind us with Hubby but it looked like they were having fun too … D started coughing a lot during this show which we thought was odd because he was perfectly fine all day long.

Well, I should have known that 💩 was about to hit the fan because that sweet family moment we had together watching this show was the last good thing that I can remember happening these last few weeks LOL (half kidding…).

We were woken up bright and early Sunday morning by a super feverish D who was sobbing that he really didn’t feel good. His temp was 102 something something … so he definitely had a high fever. Not the highest I’ve ever heard of and my kids have been sick before obviously so I told myself – alright, looks like we’re going to have to cancel the things we have for the first few days of break. But it’s Sunday, right? Surely by Thursday (Thanksgiving) he will be healthy. And hopefully even by Wednesday so we can still make our House of Prime Rib reservations??

Y’all… the entire week after … I’m talking a FULL 7 days days – it was a blur of frantic calls to Kaiser, late nights up with our kids, uncontrollable fevers, crying kids because they feel icky and nothing is helping, monitoring their breathing, nobody sleeping AND A DOG (Daisy) WHO STARTED THROWING UP SOCKS ONE AFTER THE OTHER (we are currently on 6 socks … because even up until yesterday, she was pooping more socks … LIKE WHAT THE LITERAL HECKINBOB!?!??).

It felt like a comedy of errors. It felt like a horror movie. It felt like my worst nightmare coming true. D, and then eventually A, caught the flu and it was so bad that I’ve never seen ANY of my kids be this sick before. We were THIIIIS close to taking D into urgent care because his fever would NOT break, and his fevers weren’t “Oh, he’s acting normal and just has a fever.” They were like .. he cannot eat, he cannot sleep, he is writhing in pain with body aches types of fevers. His fever finally broke on day 8 so we had SEVEN FULL DAYS of this misery. The flu took over our entire Thanksgiving break, it’s literally all I remember about that entire week.

E and Hubby also got a little sick .. E had a slight cough and slept a lot so I’m guessing was feeling lethargic. Hubby had aches for ONE day and was able to sleep it off and still has a lingering cough right now but overall was fine. Me? I was LALALA totally fine for most of break until the very last day. So for the entire week, I was manically trying to keep up with all our (my) favorite traditions while trying not to pretend that I was very sad that my kids were too sick to even enjoy it.

We had the North Pole Breakfast … thankfully, my kids perked up just enough to sit and enjoy breakfast and then it was back to bed for all of them. Finley, our elf, came back early this year (Wed instead of Fri) because originally D had a basketball tournament to play in Fri/Sat/Sun. It’s just funny that I can plan and plan all I want but someone gets the flu and everything just goes out the door, you know?

Advent calendars and new Christmas jammies for everyone. Props to GiftWrapMyFace.com for the custom wrapping paper lol!

And my Christmas press-on nails!

Thanksgiving was honestly kind of womp womp … I’d already catered/ordered all the food so we had ALL THE THINGS but I was so tired, I didn’t feel like decorating the table … then forced myself to because I knew I’d regret it in years to come if I didn’t. But this is what we were dealing with behind the scenes… the patch on his forehead is a fever cooling patch we got from CVS which was SO helpful because the regular cold compress towels weren’t cutting it with him.

And this is what I managed to put together so we could at least sit down and eat SOMETHING before lying down again. Nobody changed out of their pajamas 😂 At least the food was bomb!

The next day was the day we’d originally planned to cut down our Christmas tree. We always go to a Christmas tree farm that’s about 90 minutes away from us – we’ve been going here since J & I got married in 2009 so it’s tradition! J wanted to push it back a day but something in me said if don’t go on this day, it might not happen at all. D was sort of “stable” in that he was very sick but it was the same level of sick for several days. He’d perk up a bit with some medication but inevitably the fever would spike again and he’d be achy/not good again. I told J let’s medicate him (and A, who was also a bit feverish) and just do it. We’ll be outside and they can wear masks if needed. We usually stay and do a picnic/make a whole day out of the tree farm but I said let’s literally just go and get our tree and come home. So that’s what we did. I don’t even have a picture of our family with our tree (which is something I always get a picture of) because we were so blah the whole way. Last year, D was thiiiiis close to being able to chop down the whole tree on his own and that’s ALL he had been talking about this year – how he was going to finally chop it down all by himself. Well obviously, with the flu he couldn’t… but we pretended for his sake 😉

We got home and got to decorating our tree! Despite all the illness and hiccups, I do have to say that I think this year’s Christmas tree is one of the prettiest that we’ve picked in recent years. Our kids rotate years in who gets to light the star at the top and this year it was A’s turn!

By the time we were done decorating and done eating dinner, it was already 9pm. Traditionally we watch a Christmas movie all snuggled together after the tree is done being decorated. I tried to convince my kids that we should watch the movie the next day but they INSISTED (on the verge of tears) of watching a movie so we let them. (Brownie points to you if you can guess which movie we watched based off this picture alone.)

And it was honestly a big mistake. A woke up SUPER sick the next day … up until this day, she had a fever but mood-wise was running all around and normal energy. She was maybe a bit more tired than normal. On Saturday, she woke up and was exactly how D had been the last few days. Le sigh. I think we pushed it too much the day before with the trip to the tree farm and staying up late for the movie.

So there was just a lot more of this for D & A for the rest of Thanksgiving break:

I’m thankful that vomit was not something that was included in this year’s flu but 💩 runs and massive bloody noses WERE. D turned a corner on Sunday morning so only needed to miss the Monday back to school and then was back to normal programming by Tuesday.

A missed three days of school because she really got sick the Saturday before school resumed … she seems to be doing much better now thankfully.

Now … of course I am sick. I mentioned that I got sick on the last day of break (Sunday). All I really had at first was a little tickle in my throat and lots of fatigue. I slept almost all day on Sunday and thought I’d kicked it like J had kicked it. The tickle in my throat though .. it only grew and grew until by Thursday, it hurt SO MUCH to swallow and talk, I legit thought I might have strep throat. I’ve had strep twice and it felt just like both those times minus the fever. I missed work on Friday (it’s hard to be a school librarian when you can’t talk … LOL) and went to the dr’s office. She told me it was just a virus and nothing out of the ordinary for a sore throat. OKAY WELL IT FEELS OUT OF THE ORDINARY 😂 I couldn’t talk for most of Friday/Saturday. I was scheduled to sing for vocal team on Sunday and had to last minute cancel (which is so not fun to do, I hate disappointing people who are counting on me). Sunday, I woke up and it finally didn’t hurt to swallow but my voice was still a little raw and sore.

I had two super fun things over the weekend that I also had to cancel – one is my annual double date in SF with one of my besties and her husband. The other was my holiday GNO with my two favorite people 😭 Guys, WE HAD RESERVATIONS TO DIN TAI FUNG WAHHHHH. I am SO SAD.

Sigh, so anyway. On Sunday, I woke up feeling a bit better but also sad because so far the holidays have looked nothing like how I expected and I’ve had to cancel almost everything fun I’ve had planned .. plus, our family has missed 5 weeks of church (the very first week we were out of town to celebrate my niece’s birthday, but we’ve been hit with illness for FOUR Sundays now. FOUR!). GET BEHIND ME SATAN! So I noticed my glum bitterness and realized that I really needed to take some time to sit at my Savior’s feet with His word. I took my sweet time doing my QT today (2 Cor Ch. 1-4) and then also finally got to sit down and read some of Ruth Chou Simons’ new Advent devotional, Emmanuel. Both of those things were exactly what my heart needed .. I feel so much better now.

But! Here’s still to hoping that cold/flu/pink eye/WHATEVER is done with for this season in our family! And hopefully your families have been staying healthy so far, too!