Progress, setback.

Last weekend my mom ended up flying out for a couple days to help out. I was hesitant to accept her help - when she came out to help with M2 during P5's birth she proved to be less than helpful (if anything it was actually more work to have her here). I don't want to criticize her too much, but helping people just doesn't come naturally to her. She doesn't take initiative at helpful tasks, and when it gets tough she just retreats and does her own thing. After 24 hours here, she began just sitting on the couch reading a book while I was tending to my bedridden husband, giving attention to my two whiny/needy children, and cooking/cleaning up dinner. My mom always waits until it's too late to ask if she can help, by the time she asks I've already taken care of everything. It was helpful to have her here on Saturday afternoon and evening so that I could spend most of that time at the hospital with Mr.P, but Sunday it became obvious that I had extracted all the help I was going to get. She returned home on Monday. Later that day a couple of our closest friends came by and delivered us a bunch of Costco food. What a blessing - grocery shopping has been something I have not made time for this week.

Mr.P has had a rough recovery. He came home from the hospital late Saturday night, and for the first two days home he could hardly get out of bed without my help. He still wasn't eating, he hardly got out of bed, and the pain medicine left him foggy and hard to converse with. Tuesday he was doing a little better; he was able to get out of bed on his own and he was speaking more clearly and intelligibly. Wednesday he was feeling a little worse. He hardly got up and refused to eat. By the late afternoon he looked awful. I took his temperature and found he had a 101 temp an hour after taking his pain medicine (which would have reduced the fever). I called his doctor's office and they advised me to take him to the ER right away. I was able to get our neighbor to watch M2, and P5 and I took Mr.P to the hospital.

After doing various tests they found that he had developed pneumonia and had some fluid around the kidney indicating an infection. They decided to readmit him to the hospital, and he is still there now. He will likely be there until the weekend. I was able to get a babysitter this afternoon so that I could spend a few hours with him, and then later this evening the kids and I went to visit for a bit to bring him some home cooked food that he was requesting. I have a babysitter lined up for the morning so that I can go back and see him again (it's so much easier to visit him without the kids).

It's been a rough week for all of us. I've been exhausted and the kids have been acting up (they likely sense the stress in our household, and it's hard on them to be constantly shuffled around and watched by different people). I feel like I will never catch up on all the sleep I have lost in the past couple years.