When Will It End?

I am starting to think we should buy stock in Pedialyte since we've invested so much in their products in the past couple of weeks, anyway. We're caught in a cycle of sickness that goes away and then reappears a couple of days later, just when I think I've gotten everything sanitized and assume we're in the clear. I even did something I have never really done before: I attempted to sanitize all of the toys. My thought on this has always been: kids are exposed to germs, which isn't all bad; I can't protect them from every little thing, so why make myself crazy trying to? However, it has been exhausting keeping up with this nastiness, so I decided to soak practically everything in a bleach solution (despite the awful smell and not really liking to use chemicals to clean things), and was somewhat surprised to realize that about 99% of the things the kids play with are made of plastic and can actually be immersed in water. Most everything else, I sprayed with Lysol (again, I'm not a fan of the smell or the chemicals, but I figured it had to be done.) Also, I didn't realize how many toys we had until I tried to clean them all!

Meanwhile, I'm doing my best to keep everyone from getting dehydrated, but it is a task in shear futility to try to force the BRAT diet on two little people. Despite what the pediatrician's office told me, I would like to think that my children are smart enough to know when they are hungry and how much their little tummies can tolerate. And it's really not worth a huge battle. I refused to buy plain yogurt because I know they will not eat it and Mia would not eat dry toast (although she came up with her own solution for this by spreading applesauce on her toast) and as for rice, really? How many kids do you know who will eat plain rice? If they're sick of bananas and applesauce, how bad can PB and J or pretzels really be? So, when Mia requests yogurt, I have given her the flavored Yoplait we normally buy. I know it has more sugar which isn't helpful for the diarrhea, but I trust that she recognizes when her body tells her it's okay to eat this. She is actually doing fine. It's Logan who keeps having issues, and I am starting to think it's more from the teeth he's cutting than from whatever yucky stomach bug is currently going around. Still it would be nice to know that we are all healthy and can resume our regularly scheduled programming without fear of contaminating everyone else.