Thank you so much for your prayers and kind words. Oh, and your good suggestions: Popscicles, what a great idea. I had frozen fruit bars in the freezer, so that great. Ava also appreciated the warm pack idea.

She woke up this morning cheery and bright-eyed, confirming that she is truly on the mend. I credit it to your prayers and some helpful hints from Healthy Healing, a homeopathic book that I happened to be borrowing from a friend.

On Tuesday, after our not-so-helpful doctor visit that resulted in a prescription of “plenty of fluids,” I brought my wimpering child to the store to find the best possible beverages. If the only thing I could do for her was give her fluids, I was going to make each ounce count. I loaded my cart with an arsenal of antioxidant-rich liquids, yogurt, green tea, and all the ingrediants to make chicken and rice soup.

When we got home, I poured her a small glass of aloe vera juice. I mixed it with fresh squeezed blueberries hoping that a spoonful of blueberries would help the medicine go down. It didn’t. She took one look at it and turned her head. She then refused to drink or eat anything.

So I did what I generally do when I want to persuade her about something, I told her a story. I explained that it was bad germs that were making her so sick. The only way to get rid of these germs was to wash them away. I explained that taking a shower washes the dirt off the outside of her body and drinking water washes it out of the inside of her body. So she needed to drink lots of water to wash away all the germs.

Then I went on to tell her that not only were there germs in her body, but that there were little, tiny soldiers fighting all the bad germs. God knew that germs would come and try to hurt people’s bodies, so he gave them little soldiers to fight the germs. Everybody has soldiers in their bodies, and since hers were working so hard she needed to drink special soldier food to help them fight harder.

After this little health lesson, Ava stuck the pink straw in her mouth and sucked up every last glob of the aloe-blueberry concoction. “Look Mama, I’m feeding the soldiers!”

We spend the rest of the day feeding the soldiers, reading stacks of books, lacing cards, and massaging her little tummy. By bedtime her temperature was down to 100 degrees. I sang her to sleep hoping that she would have a good, restful night.

It was not to be so. At 1:30 she fell out of her bed and bumped her head. Then she was up every half hour from until 5:00. After sleeping for four hours she woke up at 9:00 and told me, “Mama, the soldiers came to me when I was sleeping and said that they had killed almost all the germs. There is only one germ left and they are trying to find it. I’m almost all better. Isn’t that good?”

It was very good. We continued our germ-fighting regiment of grapefruit seed tea, papaya juice, and the dreadful aloe vera juice. By the afternoon, her fever had broke. And when Nate came home from work, she was so healthy that we took her to Noodles to celebrate with her favorite bowl of mac and cheese.

Today the only thing that remains of this bizarre and painful infection is the ache between my shoulder blades from carrying and rocking my sweet, sick, thirty-six pound daughter (and possibly from scrubbing, washing and laundering all the germs out of my house).

Perhaps I should put that warm pack to use again.