Tylenol Chart

Illnesses love our home. Everything that's not fast enough to dodge the swarm of gooey toddlers gets licked and lathered in mud... though not necessarily in that order. Someone manages to touch every wall in every building we visit. Bottles and cans, that sat just an hour before on a busy store shelf, are pressed on little cheeks, over eyes, and in mouths. We get sick!

Occasionally the meeting between sickness and sleep deprivation leaves us in a less functional state. I vaguely remember times of desperation through the haze of high fever. Just alive enough to clean up vomit, operate a thermometer, pass out tylenol, and say a prayer of gratitude that no one else wants me to fix lunch either. This is our sick life. Our kids fall asleep all over the house in tiny heaps and as often as we carry them to their beds we also leave them where they lie and tuck a blanket around them. These are our worst moments. We are blessed during these times with just enough lucid moments to care for our children and get them to the hospital.

The hospital. Our home away from home. Where we spend our vacations and long holiday weekends. It seems like all our free time we would have wasted catching up or relaxing is spent at our second home just counting the days. I spent my thirtieth birthday there and just last week, in a fit of nostalgia, I took a few days to stay at my birthday vacation room and get reacquainted with all the friends we've made on previous trips.

There is one system we have in place that is our salvation during times of illness. It grounds us and keeps our children protected from our sleep deprived, fever brains. It's the tylenol chart. Between us and medicine we place a paper on which we record, in one place, every dose of every medicine for all five children. It's a messy mass of left-handed, I'm holding an angry sick baby scribbles, but at our private dispensary it protects from overdose, bad judgement in the wee hours of the night, and memory lapses. Running 105° on no sleep at three in the morning with sick identical twins... You see how it could come in handy. Spending the month of May making up for all the springtime illnesses that we thought we had missed took a lot of effort. Pre-ER we got to the point of alternating tylenol and motrin every two hours, nebulizing three to five children on a four hour rotating schedule, and of course all our daily inhalers just to keep oxygen levels above 90% and fevers under 102°. We survived. We're hanging onto that nagging cough to remind us to chase our kids down with germx and restock our private clorox wipe stash. Each time we learn a little more and get a little faster. While triplets give us this special opportunity to build our immune systems by being so fast, licking so much, and sharing everything, we know someday we'll have a nice crop of germaphobics.

Daphne at the end of her leash