My wonderful life, and all the junk that comes with it.

So yesterday Devon comes home from track practice and looks a bit worse for wear. He crashes and sleeps the evening away. Its apparent he is not well, but I'm not sure if its a combination of little sleep at Districts last weekend and track meets and track practice, or if he is sick. But as the night went on he became more and more red in the face and meaner and meaner to anyone making noise.
I finally had to send him to bed. But I got to thinking that he must have a fever with that red face, so I broke open my brand new underarm thermometer and head up to his room to take his temp. 104.8 Now way. So I grab him some advil and ice water and take his temp again. 105.5 WHAT??? I decide that the new thermometer MUST be wacko. So I head off to find the oral thermometer. By this time Devon has had the ice water and advil in him close to 10 minutes. His oral temp is 103.8. So I make a call to the nurse line and find that the combination of very high fever and a headache is bad news and they want him to be seen in the ER. Yikes! Devon really did not want to go, so I waited to see if he was going to come down in temp. He did, all the way down to 103.3.
Yep, trip to the ER is in order.
As I'm getting ready to go Hope-Anne points to my wall next to my downstairs bathroom door. There is a HUGE paint bubble full of liquid! The toilette upstairs is not steady, and apparently is leaking! I left Donnie to take care of that stinky job, you betcha I did!

So we head off the the ER and get settled in. They did two blood cultures, which they wanted from two different draw sites at least 1/2 an hour apart. And then an IV, chest x-ray and the kicker: a spinal tap.

Devon was around 3500 teens over the weekend, and his fever wasn't a baby, paired with a headache, they were very concerned.

He is still very high today, 103.1. But all the tests came back looking like he has a virus, but should be fine. If he doesn't break the fever tonight, I'll be taking him in to the doc tomorrow for a throat culture, which they did NOT run.

The most powerful weapon on Earth... a devotional

The kids love doing family devotions. And our favorite ones came from these series by Heritage Builders! They have a great example on their website about toothpaste, but it didn't work for us, our son got the toothpaste back in the tube. It cost us $20. They still got the point, though. Well, in one of the books there was a devo on the Most Powerful Weapon on Earth. Donnie stood outside with the weapon while I took turns sending the kids outside to touch it with a blindfold and see if they can figure it out. They got to go out and touch it and hold it and try to guess before we allowed them to see it. It was a tongue. We used a cow tongue, which is really heavy and gross, lol. I think they even suggest using one in the book. We got one because we had actually bought a 1/4 of a cow. Anyways, the tongue is the most powerful weapon on Earth. What you say cannot be taken back and it has the power to do lasting damage. It also has the power to do major good. It made for a great discussion and family time. Combined with the toothpaste activity, the kids were really set to thinking about things.

Entropy

I went a blog hopping yesterday and came across this post at The Mother Load. Entropy. Basically it means all things are heading for chaos, disaster, or destined to fall apart unless acted on by another force.
Entropy.
Fall apart.
To break down.
Hmmmmm.
You know, your house will become a disaster unless acted on my someone to clean it up. Your car will break down unless worked on by a mechanic. It needs maintainance.
I've been watching my family breaking down. It scares me. Why are we having disrespect? We've never tolerated it, its always been very easy to keep our home respectful. But lately that has been gone, we've been constantly dealing with disrespect. The kids to us, us to the kids. And other things, too. Things are falling apart. We had a wonderful, well behaved, loving, respectful family. Now its a struggle.
We stopped working on it. I guess we felt we had instilled those things and then dropped the ball. We stopped, gradually, family prayer times and devotions. Eventually it was not even thought of to have a family prayer. Devotions? Oh, yeah, I remember that!
Entropy.
I need to act on this.