Quarantine!

 Well, spending three weeks shut up with three sick children will certainly give you a different perspective on life. 😀 Having contracted a serious cough which was also considerably contagious, we felt it was best to keep our family away from others. So we instituted a self-imposed quarantine to protect the general population. This of course did not prevent me from contracting the disease myself. (It has required me to be out of work for eight days.)

This quarantine was instigated in the middle of our long-awaited and planned vacation. It was still a pleasant time with family, but several of the things we had hoped to do on vacation were incompatible with the requirements of quarantine.

This cough was of such a nature that it is most severe at night. This means that our children were, and indeed some still are, waking up from a dead sleep in the throes of a coughing fit so intense that it made it hard for them to breathe at first. (I experienced this myself once or twice.) This was very frightening for them, and not very much less frightening for their parents. Watching your child thrashing and struggling for breath for 10 to 15 seconds is a very troubling experience, to put it mildly.