A Night and a Day--Not Worth Remembering

This is a day that I would just as soon never repeat.  Something swept through the Cooper household with a vengeance today.  As noted in last night's post, Laura began feeling ill in the middle of dinner.  Olivia made it home before her problems kicked in.  Meredith made it to the early hours of the morning, and Cecily presented symptoms at 9.  By some miracle, Dad was unscathed, which meant that each time somebody had an "incident", Dad was called to help. It was a long, LONG, night and we didn't go anywhere or see anything today as recovery was allowed to set in.  Dad made a trip to the grocery this morning for bleach--the bottled kind and the a spray bottle version, and the apartment got a thorough antiseptic treatment, despite the hot water once again disappearing around 3 (We improvised with a tea kettle.  The most notable moment was Dad handing Olivia pitchers of water behind the shower curtain, so she could finish washing her hair.)  All day, we've been bleaching sheets, towels, bathrooms and dishes, on the off chance this might be a virus rather than food poisoning.  Whatever it was, things were looking better by evening.  Laura was able to go out with Carol for a Coke (you know how sick Laura is, when happy hour involves cola) to discuss business.  Dad took Cecily and Meredith down to the square to buy our third set of flower sticks, and then we played at the playground for a while.  One upside for the girls was that Carol had given them a small jar of peanut butter last night.  Since no one felt like eating traditional Italian today, they've been eating and vastly enjoying peanut butter sandwiches today--or at least as close as we can get.  Ever anxious to find a useful way to spend downtime, Dad managed to upload all the family photos to the cloud.  (The experience of almost losing them with the delayed bag from Germany moved this to the top of my priority list!)  Also, got some reading in:  John Hooper's, "The Italians". which does a superb job of describing how this single nation is really a conglomerate of former nations and  therefore has a hard time defining anything as truly, "Italian". Let's hope we are back on track tomorrow.