Slide Rock and HFMD

So for most people, Labor Day means it's almost the end of summer, but for us, we're still in the thick of it. :-) The weekend before Labor Day we wanted to escape the heat and had an entire Saturday totally free, so I started asking around for a good idea for a quick one day getaway. We decided to go to Slide Rock near Sedona. It's place where a stream (small river???) runs down these insanely slippery rocks so people slide down it like a slide. It is completely slick and doesn't feel like you're sliding down a rock at all. As a matter of fact, if you try to walk on it you'll most likely fall if you don't have water shoes on.... and even then you're pretty likely to fall. ;-) The only problem was that the water was painfully cold. I did the slide because Michael convinced me that going all that way and not even doing the slide would be super lame, but yikes. The bitterly cold water completely distracted me from the slide and all I remember about it was being shocked by how cold it was. Haha! Okay maybe I'm a wuss but it really was so so cold. ;-)

Also, Matthew wanted to walk into the water up to his ankles despite me warning him not to... of course he immediately slipped (even with water shoes on!) and started to go with the flow of the river. He can swim, but I was going to have to go after him since he's not a strong enough swimmer to get himself out of a moving river. (Even though he slipped into a veeery slow moving part of the river.)  Michael was off with Kate and I had Joshua and I was quickly trying to figure out my best course of action (probably to speed walk down the river a bit and grab him from the dry ground) but luckily there were a couple girls who were right next to where he was so I just asked them to grab him really quick and they were happy to help. Poor Matthew was pretty traumatized for a minute (brrr!) but he was totally fine. And Michael was off with Kate because before any of us had even tried going down the slide, Michael was going to take Kate down it on his lap. Haha! It actually would've been totally fine but the cold really shocked her once she was shoulder-deep and she flipped out. They only made it part of the way down because Kate was crying. I'm proud of her for trying though!!

Overall it was fun, and SO beautiful, but we probably won't go back until the kids are older and can go down the slide by themselves. I do want to go back to Sedona soon though. I'm sure there's so much more beauty to explore!

 Slide Rock (the actual slide was up further - this was more of a wading area... though why anyone would want to wade in that frigid water is beyond me)  ;-)

You can kinda see the slide behind Kate in this picture-

Beautiful Sedona

We stopped at Dairy Queen on our way home and the kids were very excited to get ice cream!

The following weekend was Labor Day and my sweet friend had invited our family up to her family's cabin for the weekend (fun!) but we ended up having to cancel the trip because a couple days before we were going to leave Josh started having red dots appear around his mouth. At first I barely even thought about it but then he woke up looking like this:

He didn't have a rash or spots anywhere else on his body but I knew I should probably take him to the doctor and the doctor told me it was Hand Foot and Mouth Disease. Nooooo! From here, Joshua only got worse. His mouth looked AWFUL and he also got spots all over his body, especially his hands and feet.

He did have a bit of a fever, but honestly he never seemed very miserable at all! The doctor warned me that the other kids would likely get it (it's super contagious!) and sure enough, a few days later Kate came down with it too. :-( She had it a little bit on her face, but she got it BAD on her arms and hands. The doctor told me that kids who get it bad on their hands often lose their fingernails, and a few weeks later most of Kate's fingernails did indeed fall off. (Luckily it wasn't bad because by the time a fingernail came off, a new one had already grown in underneath. Still kinda creepy though!) Anyway, I'll spare you the super nasty pictures of Kate's peeling fingers and just show you these mild ones. Haha. (Her hands got so bad that they were totally covered in red bumps... this pic doesn't do it justice at all.) She felt kind of lousy-ish for a couple evenings in a row but she really didn't have that horrible of sick-symptoms either.

I really thought Matthew would avoid it but he was eventually the last one to get it. I might not have even noticed if I hadn't been looking for it because he only got the rash on the bottom of his feet. He complained once about a sore throat but other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing with him.

Sorry for the detailed description of our bout with HFMD. Haha. Overall it wasn't fun, but I am SO glad that my kids didn't get nearly as sick as a lot of kids do when they get it. I have heard horror stories of how sick kids can get when they have it so I definitely consider us lucky! A small fever and sore throat was the worst of it - it definitely LOOKED much worse than it was! Of course it also wasn't fun having to keep my kids quarantined for so long. At least we had a fun trip to CA after everyone was better! (All about that in the next post!)