advent bugs

60% (I’m knocking on the kitchen table as I type) of our family has been afflicted with some nasty illness this week. Molly started feeling tough on Tuesday night and didn’t sleep much. She stayed home from school on Wednesday and Allison got called in to work. So I worked from home most of the day until I had to go in to administer a final exam. Molly stayed home by herself until the boys got home.
While at work that same day, Allison began to feel the affects of the same, and came home with a fever and crashed. She and Molly spent the next 36 hours together in the living room floor under piles of blankets.
Jack, who never manages to get sick on a school day, came home with a fever on Friday evening and thus missed his basketball game this morning and will miss his fiddle recital tomorrow afternoon. His fever was 103 today.
Molly managed to muster just enough energy to dance her two performances of the Nutcracker this afternoon and this evening, and Allison sucked it up and helped in the dressing room before going to work tonight. Both are weak and exhausted from such exertion.
Will and I enjoyed Molly’s performance tonight and brought an exhausted bon bon home afterward. Allison with a messed up stomach and absolutely no energy, is up all night caring for sick wee ones at the hospital.

This is the stuff of which Christmas is made. Hurry, bustle, practice, perform, work, run, attend, get dressed, bake, speed, sing, play, shop, worry, read, recite, smile, stress.
Sometimes it seems the waiting in advent is waiting for it to all be over. The hope is that it will not find us depleted. The mystery is that we’re still alive on New Year’s eve.
Pray for quiet. Pray for health. Pray for intimate family time. Pray for contemplative, prayerful solitude. Pray for salvation. It has come – have we noticed?

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