A bumpy start to a new year...

It seems we've been sick ever since Christmas. Christmas morning I woke up with an upset stomach. The day after Christmas I felt much better but Nathan was sick, so we had to cancel our plans for a much-needed date that day. Then the kids all came down with a respiratory infection--general flu-like symptoms: congestion, caughing, fever. By New Year's Eve Lily in particular was quite sick, and she and I ended up in the emergency room at 1:30 AM on January 1st for a viral-induced asthma attack. When Lily was a baby respiratory infections used to make her wheeze, and we had a nebulizer to use with asthma medication but she hadn't needed it in 3 years and I gave it away before we moved down here. Looks like I acted too soon. Anyway, we were in the emergency room until 7:30 in the morning, while they got her breathing stabilized (actually, we probably could have come home a little sooner, but the breathing treatments had raised her heart rate above 190 bpm and we had to wait for it to come back down to a safer range). She was amazingly patient through the whole thing. We got home to find that Esther had refused to sleep after I left with Lily, so she and Nathan had been up all night as well. Since then we've pretty much been trying to recover.
I have to say the scariest part of that whole night was driving to the hospital in a thick fog at 1:30 AM on New Year's Day. I wouldn't have been so concerned about the low visibility on another day, but I was worried about people out on the roads after New Year's Eve parties...I tried to stay on the back roads where there were fewer cars.
A Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you are all getting a better start to the year than us!