Chicken Pox !

The inevitable happened. Just when I am trying my ever best to avoid them. Ashley is down with chicken pox! I had thought it was bed bugs, and I keep changing the bed-sheets, but the bugs keep biting. Was at the end of my tethers with the fifth bed sheet change and was down to the last drop in the bottle of dust-mite spray when I noticed what looks like fluids in one of the spots on Ashley’s neck. So that’s it, then. CHICKEN POX !!!!!

About a ton of Kimberly’s classmates are down with a round of them. I bathed Kimberly the minute she gets back from school and I religiously forbade her from touching her baby sister till after then. We steer Ashley clear of Rajagopal’s affected toddling granddaughter when we visited during Deepavali. Two weeks has past since the visit and I thought we managed to glide past the virus, but as luck would have it, we still get them.

If Ashley had been a little bit older, like a month above one year old, I could have taken her for a vaccination and she could have avoided all these discomfort. Why oh why? It’s only a month away !!!!

Just when her eczema had lessen somewhat and scratching looks to be a thing of the past, she is now scratching herself raw again. All she wants now is for the itch to go away, the poor dear. Such discomfort for such a tiny little thing.

We went to the pediatrician and he gave Ashley some medicine to lessen the itch. However, it must still be pretty uncomfortable despite the medical relief (imagine having about 300 sores around your back and stomach) because Ashley was pretty much fretting throughout the whole daytime and night time. She probably get only about 3 to 4 hours sleep these nights, with the bouts of crying that cropped up throughout the nights every 15 minutes or so. We weight her again at the pediatrician today. It is a concern that she has lost 500 gram in the last 3 days.

I am now keeping Kimberly at arms length, without much success, though. She is drawn to those spots on her baby sister’s face like magnet. She stares at them in wonderment, and besides, she is one who just couldn’t stay away from her baby sister and going,“ aah-coo, coo, coo, Baby wants a rattle? Baby wants a rattle?” whole day long anyhow. I am lucky she didn’t try to prick her baby sister’s spots with a pencil or connect the dots with a colored pen. It’s a matter of time before I have two kids with chicken pox on my hands, or worse, contract the virus myself. Yes, this lady hasn’t gotten chicken pox at this ripe old age. I thought somehow I might be able to evade contracting it in the course of my lifetime. After all, my mom had successfully eluded this dreaded virus for the last 65 years.

Still, I am off to get myself a jab the moment I can untangle Ashley’s limbs and stronghold grips from my body (they tend to be clingy in seek of comfort) because it just won’t do if the only person in this household with 8 arms were to be rendered inoperative albeit temporarily.