It's 7:00 am and it's raining outside. While my daughter sleeps after an exhausting week of fevers, coughing and rushing out to see doctor after doctor, I'm sitting with my nearly 18-month-old son at the dinner table. He's playing with a Little People magnetic drawing board. Just a few short minutes ago, he was pointing to certain body parts on the Little People character and I was naming them off. My son already knows how to point to his ears, eyes, mouth, nose and belly button but has not been able to say any of the words yet. Today, he pointed to the hand of the blond haired character on his toy and I told him, "Hand." He shows me his own hand and repeated after me. How exciting! That brings up his total of new words this week to five, adding to the words he spoke at daycare this week: truck (pronounced "uck"), bus, Paolo (his name, which I have yet to hear him say) and John (pronounced "Ron"). John is the custodian at his daycare, and while they were thrilled to hear him say, "Hi, Ron" every time he walked by, his teachers were a little disappointed that he chose to say John's name over their own! He also found complete and utter satisfaction yesterday in repeating "Bye-bye nonna" as we left his grandmother's house and during the entire ride home.


Now I wait for my daughter to wake up from a much deserved quiet night. Her cough seems to have subsided a great deal but she did have a mild fever in the middle of the night. Every doctor that has seen her said it's just a cold but with this whole Swine flu scare, your thoughts begin to run wild. We're going to start her on a homeopathic treatment today to help rid her of the cough and try out some natural anti-viral tablets to help boost her immune system. She's still in pretty good spirits and has no other severe symptoms other than a lack of appetite. But what was that old adage? "Starve a fever, feed a cold." What do I do when she has both?