it is with mixed feelings i am blogging today.

Saturday morning dawned with Jocelyn’s right eye all pink and puffy. PINK AND PUFFY PEOPLE!!!

This makes a grand total of 3 episodes of pink eye for her. Ethan is finishing up his eye drops for his 3rd episode as well.

WHEN WILL THIS STOP!! I can’t help but feel like a failure as a parent. It goes like this. Child A has 5 more days of eye drops. Child B finishes their eye drops and both eyes look great. Child B goes 2-3 days off the eye drops and suddenly wakes up with their eye all red and irritated. We have changed pillow cases every day. We’ve changed towels every day. We’ve neer used a washcloth more than once before it goes in the laundry hamper. We’ve washed hands as often as is humanly possible while not just standing all day in the bathroom with the water running. I’m starting to go a little crazy.

To our credit, Jocelyn has a cold, and has had it for the past week. Nothing too bad, but she’s got some serious snot issues going on. Luckily, she hasn’t been coughing, and hasn’t had a fever or anything. There are usually 2 ways to get conjunctivitis. You catch it someone who’s got it, or you have a cold and it kind of works it’s way into your eye. So it could be that we’re doing nothing wrong, she could have just gotten it because of this cold she’s fighting.

I still feel like shit about this though. And Ethan is supposed to be done with his very-much-a-pain-in-the-ass drops (tobramycin) (must be given every 4 hours, so one of us makes a trip to school during our lunch break to administer them). And I’m totally freaked out that he’s just going to turn up with them again 2-3 days after he’s off of them.

Our pediatrician was closed this past Saturday, so I took her to an urgent care place, who prescribed some drops (sulfacetamide sodium opthamalic solution). Something different than she had been taking before (which was vigamox). We got them and dutifully have been putting them in her eyes, but when monday morning arrived, she did not look ANY BETTER. There was no way she could go to school with her eye still pink and swollen, in fact, if anything, I think her eye was MORE swollen than it was Saturday.

So today, I blog from home, as I stayed home with her. We went to the doctor, who gave us a new prescription (and she commented that the drops we were using wasn’t likely to do any good, ergh), went to target to fill prescription, then drove to the school to give Ethan HIS dosage of drops.

I toyed with the idea of going from there up to have lunch with James, as he did last week when he was home with Ethan, but the Jocelyn was acting pretty grumpy and tired, so off we went home, and I got her into bed for naptime (with no fewer than FOUR crying jags, the poor dear was so tired).

So this sucks, because damn. Pink eye. GO AWAY ALREADY!

However, it doesn’t suck too bad, because instead of trying to work from home as I usually do when I’m home with a sick kid, I am taking the day off. It is so nice. I’m not putting movie after movie in so as to entertain the child while I try to accomplish something. I’m not saying, “Not now, mommy’s working,” whenever the child wants to inform me of inane, but nevertheless very important details,

“I”M THREE!”

“I’m the MOMMY! You’re the BABY! NAPTIME, GO TO SLEEP NOW!”

“I can do a SOMERSAULT!”

“LOOK MOMMY! I took off ALL my clothes! I’m NAKED GIRL!”

“LOOK! I picked out this booger! FROM MY NOSE!”

Now I can actually acknowledge or reprimand these announcements on a case by case basis instead of hoping to distract by pointing out what Cinderella/ Lightning Mcqueen/ Totoro is doing on screen.

When the day started I had grand plans of cleaning the house from top to bottom in this beautiful gift of a day spent home with my offspring, and I did manage to go through a lot of the crap sitting on our coffee table (and under our coffee table) but then the morning gotten eaten up with errands, and the afternoon has been eaten up with blog reading (and now writing).

But one thing I shall be doing. I’ll be donning the latex gloves (because i have very girly sensitive skin) and wiping off every fucking toy and surface with those bleachy sanitizing wipes to make sure no pink eye cooties can stick around to infect my children again.

-amy won’t rub eyeballs with bleachy sanitizing wipes though