FEB. 27 UPDATE: Reminder from winter: I'm still here

Just when we were getting used to weather in the 20s or even, sometimes, above freezing, winter gives us a little reminder that it's still February -- we've got at least a month of winter to slog through. At least. It could be mid-April before we see spring in South Dakota.

It's hard to tell exactly how many inches of snow we got, since the wind was blowing as well. There were drifts up to Dave's chest in a number of places in the yard.



Yeah, we're going to have to figure out what to do about that drifting in front of the door of the house. A snow fence, maybe? Planting something there won't do any good for several years.

... Dave worked on clearing snow in the yard with the tractor yesterday afternoon, even though the snow blow around him while he worked, canceling out much of his efforts. He made enough of a dent that he was able to get to work this morning in the pickup, though. (He didn't go to work yesterday, obviously, but since two of his coworkers did make it to the office, he had to take a vacation day. He wasn't very pleased about that.) There will be more snow clearing to do this afternoon.

... We've got two sick kiddies at home now. We took them both to the doctor Wednesday (before the weather hit). Erik has an ear infection, but the up side of that is that as soon as the antibiotics kicked in, he started cheering up. Sofia just has a cold, for now, but with her history of viral-induced asthma, we have her on her nebulizer as a proactive measure.

Speaking of her asthma, I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago when I realized just how prevalent that has become in children. I was one of four moms sitting around a table, and each of us had a child with this diagnosis! One of the other moms says about half the moms she work with say the same. We were all chatting about the same medicines, whether they were doing any good, whether they were causing behavioral problems ... I don't think moms used to bond over this!

I asked Sofia's lung specialist on Wednesday why he thought this is now so common. He said part of it is diagnosis -- people used to call this bronchitis, and some level of wheezing in kids was accepted and not treated. Now there's a good treatment, so it's diagnosed right away. But he also said there's a hypothesis that because of all the good vaccines we have now, our bodies don't learn how to properly respond to viruses -- when one shows up, the body over-reacts, which is what the asthma symptoms are.

Sounds plausible. But I wonder if there's more to it than that -- is there something in our environment that is causing a change as well?