The Two Week Wait

When I first got a touch of baby fever 5-6 years ago, I ended up on message boards.  It was pretty much inevitable.  I’d been on message boards to plan my wedding, and found them remarkably helpful considering the fact that I had no idea what I was doing.  So when I was unexpectedly hit by the baby bug about a year after our wedding, it just seemed natural to turn to strangers for opinions and advice.

But unlike the wedding boards, the baby boards were a whole new world.  They were filled with girls trying to conceive, clutching copies of Taking Charge of Your Fertility, charting the slightest twinge, and discussing their bodily fluids in more detail than you’d ever want to read about here.  Trust me.  To be a part of the conversation – which I so desperately wanted to be at the time – you needed to know the lingo, and it wasn’t long before I became familiar with the “Two Week Wait”.  In case you’re wondering, the Two Week Wait is the period of time between ovulation and your period.  It’s the length of time you are supposed to wait in order to get an accurate pregnancy test result…although most of the girls on the baby boards admitted to testing somewhere around 1 or 2 days into the second week out of sheer excitement, only to chastise others for “testing early” when they did the exact same thing.  For what it’s worth, I genuinely don’t think anyone made it the entire 2 weeks.

But with all that behind me – and with trying to conceive quite literally being the furthest thing from my mind – the Two Week Wait has taken on a completely different meaning.

When Hazeline woke up vomiting with a 102 fever last Saturday morning, I knew that the Two Week Wait had officially started.  My poor child was pale and lethargic and couldn’t keep so much as water down.  All she wanted to do was cuddle, but doing so was uncomfortable for all involved (and required tarps if you wanted to be on the safe side).  I felt terrible for her.  As I made every attempt to make her comfortable, a little voice in the back of my head said, “Who will be next?”.

You see, two weeks is the approximate gestation time for illness in our house.  If another child (or adult) is going to catch it, it will probably happen in a two week period.  Doesn’t matter how much I quarantine or Lysol or push vitamins like they’re candy, chances are, another one of them will catch what ever the first one brought into the house.  The last time Hazeline was sick, she took no only the baby down with her, but Erajh and I as well.  It was ugly.  And the way I look at it, Greenleigh is due since she didn’t get sick last time.

After a quick trip to the doctor (turns out, only my kids get sick in the summertime), a Zofran, and a half a dozen doses of Motrin over the course of the weekend, Hazeline was fixed up and ready to go to school on Monday morning.  But that wasn’t my concern.  Instead, I kept thinking, “Who will be next?”.  Would the next weekend be shot?  Would I get a phone call from daycare during the week and need to drop everything to pick one of them up?  Would I have to find someone to cover my incredibly busy week that I had set up with clients who came in town from up North?  When I dropped the kids off on Monday morning, I should have been happy that my child was feeling better, but I felt more nervous than anything else.

So here I sit, in the middle of the Two Week Wait, just waiting for those pesky germs to show themselves…or not.  One week down.  One to go.