This has been one of the most grueling parenting weeks that I can remember, barring the immediately post-partum weeks which I can't even remember now - a nifty biological trick which keeps my family growing. When my husband got home early Friday evening, I crawled into bed and basically slept for the rest of the weekend, waking only briefly to feel guilty that my husband was running errands and looking after little sick people.

Everyone is feeling better today. The kids suddenly went from being just horrifyingly sick to being almost okay, albeit in a scary, pox-covered sort of way. I read that as soon as they start blistering over and stop getting new pox they can head back to school, which makes me think really? I'm supposed to send them to school with hundreds of pox scabs on their face? Do I feel like they don't get mocked enough on a daily basis? If I was more of a Victorian parent, I might feel like a good public airing of their poor blistered faces might be good for keeping their vanity in check, but being not a Victorian mother, I just feel sorry for my poor pretty children.

My grandmother had a very, very old cookbook, her mother's from the very turn of the 20th century, and I LOVED it, reading it over and over again as a very odd child. I well remember my snickering fascination with the chapter on Invalid Cookery, with its recipes for gelatines made by boiling calf hooves, and teas made from horrible things: raw eggs, beef tongue, bran - and I suspect that many invalids willed themselves to get better just so they could avoid another hideous cup of mystery tea. And then some of the recipes were for mysterious things that sounded poignantly delicious - custards and syllabubs and slips and blancmanges, foods that no one will ever eat again, really.

My own invalids did not have much in the way of actual cookery this past week, though - there's nothing quite like having mom sick at the same time as the kids to really lower the quality of cooking in the household, although my husband was a real trooper and we ate a LOT of spaghetti. Spaghetti and canned soup. And it was fine, but it lacked the magic of vanished food, cool white dishes that would sit easy with a fevered child, this dream food that tasted like rosewater and milk, prepared by calm unhurried hands.

I spent one night last week laying beside my daughter in her narrow bed, wiping her face with cold cloths, her eyes burning and infected and her fever cruelly high. After a while, we just held hands in the dark, there being no other comfort I could offer, tears falling silently from her swollen eyes, pressing my face to her fever-matted hair. But the misery passed and today found us in the shelter of our porch, eating cookies from a bag and watching a robin build a nest and blowing bubbles that hovered in a moment of iridescent beauty before vanishing from sight, this pretty thing that happened and was gone.