You Give Me Fever...

Scarlet fever, not quite what the original artists had in mind when they wrote the song. Two weeks before school started back for the year we had the two big ones knocked out with Scarlet Fever. It was the first week of Wolf's holidays and we were quarantined. This was our big week, the week we had planned to do adventuring every day, maybe an overnight at the beach hut with a trip out to Mt Fox. To say I was upset was an understatement. I was cranky, frustrated, upset, annoyed... I'll stop short of pulling out my thesaurus.

This was our first chance since Butterfly was born where we had Wolf and the boys off school and work at the same time. I was sooooo looking forward to this, so were the kids. Wolf's usual lack of enthusiasm for anything that might be considered "social" or "adventure" was being ignored and we were going to go and make some fantastic memories and he was going to have fun once he was out there... I knew he was!

I may sound a little callous, my kids were kinda quite sick, after all. But they weren't acting it. Knowing that physically they were still up for all this stuff and within 24 hours of the antibiotics we were seeing improvements in their physical symptoms, but we were still on a 5 day quarantine and I would NEVER willingly put other people in danger. I knew that for my normally healthy kids with no other problems that scarlet fever is pretty much a non-event if caught quickly but for others it could easily be life threatening. There are so many other health issues that can cause dangerous complications so I was not going to break our quarantine, at home we stayed. Slowly but surely the state of the house and our moods went down hill.

One of our precious friends delivered us a meal one afternoon, along with it she brought some chocolates and treats for the kids and a book that made me cry and a gingerbread house kit! She had bought it on a whim when she saw it on sale post-Christmas and hoped that it would fill in some of our house-bound time. Well, wouldn't you know it, the boys reminded me I had completely forgotten that in our pre-Christmas craziness I had purchased a gingerbread house kit and it was still sitting somewhere in it's box. The weeks before Christmas were a little crazy... I cannot even remember why, I think the baby was sick, or I was... or someone was, we've had a lot of sickness lately.

So one afternoon we sat and we decorated. Lion and Dragon took one house and Monkey and I took the other. It was fantastic! I remember buying the house thinking "Boy, I'm going to regret this!" and "This is going to end in fights and arguments and this is such a mistake." DID NOT HAPPEN. Partly, I am sure, because we had two kits but mostly it was just good kid-friendly fun. So, without further prattling on, here are the photos...

Monkey turns into such a ham sometimes, it's rare for others to get to see it or for me to catch it on camera so I LOVE this photo. Monkey and I decorated this masterpiece.

These adorable boys melt my heart. They decorated this incredible masterpiece. I piped the loops on the roof shingles, they did the rest of the piping and decorating, I was amazed at how well they handled the piping bag and how they carefully selected each decoration using the box for inspiration then adding their own touches.

Monkeys and mine on the left, Lion and Dragon's on the right. 

This wall and roof section was all I was allowed to design, Monkey is quite the artistic director. From what I have heard from photographers he has a career in food styling ahead of him if he keeps his opinionated ways.

This was a gingerbread man. Monkey kept calling him his dude. "I am going to eat my dude first".

The boys were all better soon and we planned to move as many of our activities to the next week... but it poured down all week. Like flooding type rain, not the sort of thing you can brush off and go out anyway.  Oh well, we'll just do them all when it's cooler later in the year, I wasn't looking forward to the sweltering heat anyway. Lion did have a reoccurrence (or something similar) in the first week of school that required some stronger antibiotics to make sure we knocked it out but they are the picture of health now.