The Tredway Three have been home a great deal over the last 10 days or so. It began with the cold weather (and snow!) and continued throughout the following week. Last week was cold, that’s just all there is to it. Cold, cold, cold. One last trip to the children’s zoo? I think not. A nice autumn walk to enjoy the fall colors? Uh, no. Playground? No. Backyard? No. Sit on the porch for a spell? Perhaps a minute tops.

We were homebound. The extrovert and her two introverted family members were tucked away indoors for the duration of the cold spell. And then… Jeremy. got. sick.

Dun, dun, dun!

In the middle of the night, my husband became a shaking mess. With chattering teeth he asked me to cuddle close to warm him up. Let’s just say that getting close to him felt about as comfortable as hugging the sun. He was smoking hot—and not in a good way. I knew he was burning up with fever but he had already taken meds at bedtime (when he knew he was coming down with something), so I tried to warm him up a bit and wait it out ’til morning. A few hours later he wasn’t shaking anymore and informed me his fever had probably broken. I pulled the thermometer out of his mouth: 101.7.

That afternoon I dropped him at the doctor’s office, ran to pick up Livia from preschool, then returned to hear the doctor’s report. I found my sick guy in the waiting room, a paper mask covering the lower part of his face. Another woman, with an infant in her arms, was wearing a mask too. Apparently Jeremy walked into a waiting area full of masked folks. Uh-oh.

Let me pause here to mention the terror and confusion accompanying the H1N1 virus. People are dying of this strain of the flu. People always die of the other strains of the flu. But for whatever reason, perhaps because of its contagious nature, we are all freaking out about H1N1. I have type 1 diabetes and RA. My child is five years old. Jeremy took steroids for allergies last month (I only mention that because I wonder if his immune system is a little depressed right now). None of us want to die of H1N1, no one does, and yet some will—and are—dying of this virus. And as much as we’d like the vaccination for H1N1, no one in Lincoln is handing it out just yet. Back to the story…

Jeremy had a cough, a fever, body aches from head to toe. He apparently looked just like all the other coughing patients in the waiting room that day. And guess what? They weren’t testing for H1N1 anymore. Because really, it just didn’t matter. My ailing husband was told to take Tamiflu right away, and even though our neighborhood Walgreens was out, another pharmacy filled the order. Within four days, Jeremy was feeling much better. By the time the weekend came around, I was down for the count. No fever, but body aches, sore throat, exhaustion.

So… What were we sick with? H1N1? Perhaps. No one knows. I’m hoping we had a mild case of it and will thus have immunity against this particular strain for a time. Regardless of a name for our illnesses, we stayed home. For days on end.

I did dishes. I did laundry. Livia and I made bread. We watched all sorts of old cartoons on Hulu. Jeremy introduced Liv to The Dark Crystal and The Neverending Story. I got sucked even deeper in Harry Potter Book 5. But yesterday something glorious happened. The sun came out and warm, October temps hugged us like an old friend. We turned off the tv. I put the book down, for a spell at least (get it? Spell? Harry Potter?). Then we went off to the Pioneers Park Nature Center and praised God for this amazing world he’s given us.

Today we’re back to the daily grind—and we’re thanking God for the blessing of good health.