Whoever sent this mask to Naomi, THANK YOU! It is wonderful! It arrived in a yellow envelope and wasn’t labeled with who sent it.

Today was kind of a blurr. There were so many difficult moments that my body is physically feeling everyone of them but I’m trying to forget about them mentally. I would say today has been one of the 5 most difficult days of my life. I washed, dried, folded and put away 4 loads of laundry and sanitized the room. It took me from 8:30am until after 8pm to complete that because I was constantly being distracted by something more pressing – a child needing me – although I can’t list anything specific right now.  Sinéad had a lot of joint pain from the steroids this morning and wanted to be held all day.  That meant that everything took longer.  Naomi spent some time with our friend here while I cleaned. It kept her away from Sinéad and me cleaning.

Caitríona was my biggest helper today.  She opened doors, carried garbage, laundry, boxes from the front desk, washed her hands constantly and sanitized repeatedly without needing to be told, and was mostly well-behaved while Sinéad was a handful.  When fatigued, none of us were at our best and fuses definitely were short by all the stress of having Sinéad not feeling well.

We walked to that hospital pharmacy for medicines for Sinéad.  Some were not ready so we grabbed Subway sandwiches while we waited.

Eating lunch in the afternoon (because we were running late) was the first normalish moment we got from Sinéad in a few days. She ate well today for lunch and dinner. After a nap, she began to run around more and act like herself. All yesterday and today I carried her everywhere.

But by dinner she was exhausted.  She did eat her whole hot dog and a few tastes of my homemade and very awesome cream of celery soup.  Keeping her seated was really difficult but I didn’t want her running around coughing and spreading germs either.  Please she refused to put her shoes on and that was just gross.

I felt like a yoyo today bouncing back and forth between a mom who needed to offer support and a mom who wasn’t needed and she could do things herself. Still very clingy, and tonight sounding a bit raspy, she does look to be improving well.

She does not like taking medicine and I’ve probably worn more cherry syrup flavored medicines than she has ingested. She is like wrestling a 500-lb monster to swallow 5ml of flavored syrup. She bites me with jaws of steel when I try to pry her mouth open. She spits like a cobra once the medicine is in her mouth. I had to change the sheets on the bed tonight as I tried to get it into her while she was asleep and she starting thrashing around and got sticky cherry syrup all over us both and the bed.

Tomorrow will come. Thank God today is over. Thank God Naomi is still well. Clinic is tomorrow at 8:30 am. Later clinic would be really nice. We are not morning people.