Not your average weekend

Perhaps you’re wondering how Crazy Hair day and the sick Gymnast ended up? To put it mildly, it’s a long story…

Thursday morning, as I knew she would be, she was absolutely determined to have her hair done and go to school just for the parade. (This is Little Miss Determination, after all, as how else will she get to be an Olympic gold medalist?!)

I did her hair, we went to the parade, she sat there looking dreadful. She was noticed by the judges. She was awarded a chocolate rabbit (that she can’t even eat!), and then she said “Can we go home now?”

So again, we were victorious, but I must say it felt like a hollow victory because she was really still unwell, having had practically no food for about a day.

The next day was Good Friday and I was off early in the morning for music practice at church because I was singing as part of the team leading the music that morning. I expected my husband and daughters would be there in time for the service. However, The Gymnast fell asleep on the lounge and pretty much slept on and off for the whole day. They never made it to church.

She developed a fever, which we treated with both paracetamol and ibuprofen (one didn’t work by itself, we needed both). She was still very unwell. On Saturday night she developed an extremely impressive rash all over her torso, up her arms, and down her thighs. It was time to visit the hospital. She and I spent until 2:30am at the emergency department of the local hospital, trying to determine what what wrong. Again, the verdict was “it’s just a virus.”

She finally started to turn the corner yesterday, as we didn’t need to dose her up with any medicine the whole day. The rash is still amazingly impressive, but thankfully hasn’t been itchy at all. We’ll follow up with a doctor’s visit to get the results of the blood culture. Maybe we’ll get more answers, maybe we won’t. In the back of my mind, I suspect scarlet fever, but unless it shows up in the blood culture as a bacterial infection, then it can’t be scarlet fever as that is bacterial.

She definitely won’t be back at gymnastics any time this week (she’s had several days with practically no food!) and I’m not sure when she’ll be allowed to go back to school.

On top of all of that, first thing on Saturday morning, I found out that my website had gone over its allowed bandwidth for the month, meaning it automatically went offline. I immediately called my hosting provider to upgrade the hosting package, but because it was a long weekend, although I could pay for it, the people weren’t there to do it. Obviously it is back on again now or you wouldn’t be reading this, but 2 days without my website over a long weekend is less than ideal…

My plan for the weekend was to get sewing on some luggage that I’m making for a family trip later on in the year, but I didn’t allow myself to work on it on Sunday because I was so tired from our hospital visit that I knew if I did, I would just make mistakes with expensive fabric. I did get to work on it yesterday, so I made some progress, but not nearly so much as I had hoped.

So all in all, it wasn’t the weekend I had expected, but that’s the way things go sometimes. I’m just glad The Gymnast is finally getting better and that no one else in the family has gotten sick.