Not Pox

The saga of the chicken pox ended in this way: On day 15 of little spots appearing on both children, we went back to the doctor, this time seeing our pediatrician and not the physician's assistant we saw last time.  The pediatrician took one look at Sydney and said, "That's not chicken pox."   She diagnosed an unnamed virus and cleared the children to go back to daycare the following day.

So, almost a week of keeping children quarantined in the home for a virus that causes little itchy bumps that is not the chicken pox.

On the one hand, I'm glad everyone is fine.  On the other hand, it was a whole lot of fuss for nothing.

Some highlights of the quarantine:

Gram's idea: if you really can't leave your house, but your house is driving you crazy, get in the car, drive to Sonic, get a treat and drive home

playing My Sims, a very cute animated Wii game that the kids could follow along and give me tips as I played

a new Lego set

Sydney building the set, pretty much on her own

Sydney has really enjoyed this Lego Friends set.  There was some initial hype about how the marketers at Lego were making "easy" sets for girls.  Further reading shows that they did research and found that girls like to play as they go, so they did a modular build (which is easier... each room has its own bag of parts and its own instructions) so that each room can be played with before the rest of the house is done.  I don't know about other, older, girls, but Sydney did just as Lego predicted.  She build a room, stopped building and played.  She had the patience and attention span to do no more than two rooms a day and still took a break in between the two.  We've had the house for a week now and still haven't finished it and are in no rush to do so.

So, all in all, aside from Jeremy having some difficult days of trying to work from home with the kids, the not pox was actually a sort of fun diversion for us all as we tried to find new ways to stay entertained at home.