In which Rebekah deals with the sickies

In France, H1N1 flu was originally given the name Grippe Mexicaine rather than swine flu. I suspect that this is because the French government was less concerned about annoying the Mexican government than the US government was. In any case, it's called grippe, type H1N1 here now, and though it doesn't seem to be as prevalent here as in the States (at least based on Facebook status updates), the incidences are definitely ramping up.

Sapphire and Ezio were both sick all day yesterday with the holy triumvirate of flu symptoms: headache, fever, and hacking cough. Sapphire added a sore throat to her symptoms, and Ezio added a stomach ache to his list, and we spent basically all day inside. This is complicated for a couple of reasons.

The first is that we don't have all that much space, or all that much stuff to do in the house. American DVD's won't play on a French DVD player (different coding rules) and so we didn't bother to bring any of our movies with us. We have cable, but it's very limited (only about 8 channels) and there is nothing for kids on past about 10 o'clock. And we brought a limited number of toys with us, primarily Legos, because of space constraints. To add to the lack of stuff to do, we haven't been to the library in 3+ weeks (that was one of the things we were going to do yesterday), and so the kids have read their books a gazillion times already.

The second is that I typically only shop for one day's groceries at a time here in France. We live only a 5 minute walk from the hypermarché, and I have to carry (or pull) home everything I buy. So there typically isn't a whole lot of excess food in the house. I didn't feel comfortable dragging the kids to the store if they're sick, nor did I feel comfortable leaving them home alone (Blaise is at a conference in Nancy this week) while I went to the store. While it is relatively close, it's still generally a 45 minute trip in total. So we were stuck with what was in the house, along with what I could pick up at the local boulangerie (generally about a 6 minute round trip), since I felt comfortable leaving Sapphire and Ezio alone for that long. (I also left them alone while Cherry and I ran to the pharmacie for more ibuprofen yesterday. Again, a 6 or 7 minute trip.)

This morning, Sapphire and Ezio were still sick, but Cherry was fine. Since she was bored out of her mind all day yesterday, I decided that I would leave Sapphire and Ezio at home while I dropped her off at school. Hopefully she will be less bored today since she gets that 3 hours of interaction and activity. I also discovered that administering liquid ibuprofen is more difficult than I had previously realized. When I was trying to give Ezio a dose earlier today, I inadvertently shot the dose into his nostril instead of his mouth. Oops.