I'm not hungry

I haven't been to Walmart yet.   This past week my family wondered about my electronic disappearance, no facebook postings, no blog, not even a quick call. I can explain.

It all started with, "I'm not hungry.", a sentence that is never uttered by my 25th percentile in weight and 95th in height pre-teen, what I usually hear is, "Can I have seconds? (or thirds?)."  It all unravelled from there.

She had a friend coming over to bake something special for a gathering we were attending that evening.  After serious deliberation, they baked some amazing oatmeal raisin cookies.  We then headed out to "Soup Night", a late winter/early spring tradition of a weekly Saturday evening potluck with board game playing/guitar playing/jigsaw puzzling/video gaming,etc. evening, The hosts provide a giant crock or two of soup and home baked bread, hence the name "Soup Night.  The tradition has been on-going for 11 years, we joined in a few weeks ago.

The evening was going well until my daughter took me aside and said her stomach didn't feel all that great, but she wanted to stay.  Some ginger ale was found and she went off with the other kids. Later, she tapped me on the shoulder and with one look at her face, I was gathering her friend to go home while handing her a grocery bag, just in case, for the ride home.  She just made it home before it all started. My mind started going through all of the things that she had eaten in the past couple of days, and the only thing I came up with was a slice of cake that her dad had bought for her in a bakery near his work.  It had cream frosting, had it been refrigerated properly...?  It was only thing that she had eaten that no one else had.

She spent early part of the night trying to sleep on the bathroom floor, but then we moved her into the bedroom so that she could get some rest and I set up camp with couch cushions next to her bed.  At about 2 AM, as I was cleaning her up, for the fourth time, she turned her wan face to me lifted her head a little and said, "I'm sorry. I know you must be tired and want to go to bed."  Then put the great weight of her head down on the pillow.  I assured her that this is what moms do,   I did get to sleep several hours later when I woke her father, sent him for Gatorade at the gas station and then deputized him as cleaner-upper.

It appears that it was not the cake, after the vomiting ceased (fifteen hours after it had started) she had a high fever, chills and the whole ugly bit.  It looked like the flu, but it wasn't.  For several days I didn't even leave the house beyond letting the chickens out. One day I took my cell phone with me to the front garden, so that if she needed me she could call me without getting out of bed.  Today, Thursday, she is back to school for the first time.

Time to get some fencing, we need to corral the chickens in the evenings when the neighbors take their dogs out after work.  One neighbor, who moved in over the winter, has two large and reasonably trained pit bulls who have discovered that we have something interesting over here, but they aren't sure what it is.  They are well trained enough that if you tell them , "No." they stop, but we won't always be in the yard. We can also hear Tank barking most pitifully across the ravine in the evenings, I know exactly where he will head one of these days when he gets loose.  I'm going to have to train the girls to come around at about 4 PM for snacks inside their soon to be built chickie corral.  Time to call around to see who has the best price for fencing materials and get  to it.