By the 5th day of school...

By the fifth day of school (that was yesterday) we already had stomach flu, pink eye, strep throat, and hand, foot, and mouth disease going around. No joke. In September. Holy cow, I don't even want to know what that means for the rest of the year, especially when flu season hits! To make things seem even worse, while we were discussing these illnesses in the staff lunch room yesterday, a new teacher turned to me and said, "You'd better be careful. Some of those things can kill babies before they are born. Fifth Disease is a really bad one, too, so watch out for that..." All I could think was, Thanks, lady. I really need to get more nervous about every little thing!

I had never even heard of Fifth Disease! In my year of student teaching and my first 4 years as a teacher I have never heard of a student (or anyone for that matter) having this illness. So, right after lunch, I googled it. For once Dr. Google actually made me worry LESS about something! Can you believe it?! Sounds like it is not too terribly common, has pretty obvious symptoms, and doesn't pose a risk to pregnant women and their unborn children after early pregnancy (for those of you newly pregnant, I wouldn't even worry about this one...I see sooooo many kids and they are germy little buggers and have never had a kid get this! And I was newly pregnant at the end of the school year last year and everything has seemed fine so far!). Even so, I have been washing my hands as often as possible and using hand sanitizer between each class, given the crazy amount of sickness roaming the halls already this school year.

We have our appointment tomorrow. I am excited but also nervous! My subfertile self made (rather crappy) sub plans for my classes in case we get bad news and I can't make it to school tomorrow afternoon. In my heart I feel like things will be fine, but there is this little nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me to brace myself. I have still been able to feel Ponyo move since starting school but he/she is a lot less active since I started spending so much time on my feet. More than one person has told me that Ponyo is probably just sleeping more since he/she is being rocked by my movement all day. I have felt a few flips and kicks each night but nothing like I experienced the week before school started up again. We are praying that Ponyo is healthy and that everything is as it should be!