Home. Sick.

Well, I was having a really nice Christmas vacation till I woke up with a sore throat on Christmas morning, which was a full-blown chest cold by Friday morning. Then I spent the next couple days all alone on the couch at my in-laws' house at the lake, coughing, and missing lunch with my cousins and aunt, and also missing my sister-in-law Julie's visit with my niece and nephew, whom I only get to see twice a year.

By Sunday morning, I just wanted to be at home. It's so much easier to be sick in your own house. So we left a day early, missing my extended family's get-together and my cousin Pam's announcement of her engagement and my cousin Janine's announcement of her pregnancy. I hate missing out on stuff--I already feel like I miss out on so much, living so far away, and then to be sick for half of my trip...I was feeling pretty sad and sorry on Friday and Saturday, I can tell you.

There were a couple of silver linings:

-Since my in-laws now own two homes, I had a place to sit and be sick in peace and quiet, which was such a blessing, since every other place I could have stayed was full of people and kids.
-When you're sick, everybody's so sweet and concerned about you. It made me feel very loved, which I knew I was anyway, but it's nice to be reminded.
-Leaving early meant we were driving across rural Maryland and rural Virginia in the dark and got to enjoy a beautiful sky full of stars, not something I see much in light-polluted Hampton Roads.

That's all the silver linings I can think of, though! Well, it was probably a good thing that we left Sunday afternoon...I have been coughing worse than ever today and that would have been hard in the car. I was able to keep the coughing mostly under control on the way home with Mucinex, but today the Mucinex only seems to help for a short while, and then it's back to coughing again. I am so over the coughing!

When I was a kid, June Allyson used to do these commercials for female incontinence pads, and I used to think how horrible it would be to get so old you couldn't hold your own pee. Now I know how horrible it is--when I cough, there ain't no holding it, and it's just run, run, run to the bathroom all night long, which is exhausting in and of itself, besides the coughing.

To get through the nine-hour drive back to Virginia, I broke down and bought some of those old-lady pads, and what a help they were. And still are, as I continue to cough-and-pee. So I learned a new cold coping skill, too. I guess that's a good thing...

I had a nice time before the cold, though--my mom and I did a little shopping and had lunch on Monday and I looked through a bunch of old family photos with my dad. Tuesday we took my nephew Tanner and niece Kylie to Pittsburgh and had an absolute blast with them. They are eleven and seven years old, and exactly the right age to really enjoy stuff with. And Christmas itself wasn't so bad--I was feeling under the weather at that point, but not flat-out sick, and we had fun opening presents and having dinner. Got to spend a couple really nice evenings with my in-laws, too. So it wasn't all bad.

I was feeling pretty good this evening; the Mucinex and Vicks Vap-o-Rub were working and Todd brought me home chicken in garlic sauce and hot-and-sour soup, and I was reviving...and now I'm back to the uncontrollable coughing again. Oh well. I feel like I might have passed the worst of it. I hope so.

Hope everybody else had a happy and HEALTHY Christmas!