December and the chicken pox. The whole story.

Here is handsome young Matthew, age 6.
Thomas, age 14, covered in pox!
Hard to see, but Sabrina, age 3, is covered in pox, too. She did have the mildest case.

Here is Ruthie, age 1 with her pox. She had most of them in her hair, running in a straight line from ear to ear. Poor thing had a hard time laying down to sleep. Her sweaty head made it the prime place for the pox to show themselves.
This would be our Ellie, age 14. Such a cheerful countenance.
Brian, age 12, took this break from school to do a little catch up on his reading. He had 4 books finished in the time it took his pox to run their course.

Maria, 10, reluctant to let her pox be documented for posterity.

Here is the story behind the pox. We knew that we had been exposed over Thanksgiving, so we waited for 2 weeks before the first outbreak. That lucky child would have been Joseph. Three weeks later, about 5 days before Christmas, we began to see the first signs in the other 8 children. That's right, 8 children down with the pox over Christmas. As you can tell by the pictures, they all took it well and we sailed right through our first major childhood disease. We went through 3 boxes of Aveeno oatmeal baths, half a bottle of calamine lotion and numerous movies and books. The children would tell you that it wasn't as bad as they thought it would be, but they wouldn't want to do it again. Because we knew we were exposed, we were home bound almost the entire month, not wanting to spread this to anyone else. As such, this recaps our entire month of December from initial outbreak to final outbreak and recovery.