Hi, this is Monica Packer from About Progress, and this is The Messy Middle, a monthly series where I share some of my own messy middle, so you can see what progress looks like for a real woman in real time.

I always start this series with the What's Happening segment where I share about what's happening around the Packer household.

Well, a lot of sickness again.

I cannot believe how sick this winter has been, namely for my three-year-old.

Since November, he has gotten, gosh, let me go through it.

He's had the cough, flu, strep,

RSV, another kind of cough, ear infections, hand foot mouth disease, and now he's in another round of a barking cough. That's eight illnesses in just the last few months. And that's just one

kid. I was in the

urgent care yesterday because a kid had an infected wound from another kid in our family. They

were on the trampoline a week ago. And my eight-year-old's teeth, you know, went into his brother's

leg. And I didn't just go into his brother's leg and went

through his lips and it was bleeding and his teeth were a little wiggly. And I was really worried

about him. And we disinfected the other little guy's wound. But that's what got infected.

Enough so that I had to go to urgent care on Sunday with him and get him some antibiotics ASAP.

And the doctor was like,

guess what? Human bites are way worse than dog bites. And I was like, wow. So that kind of is the month. I mean, I thought this month was going to be easier because finishing the book in March was so

intense between one kid getting hand-foot mouth disease the week of the book being due. I got a little bit of an extension over the weekend. And then another kid, my youngest, getting hand-foot-mouth for the week after and being home all week. And then Brad was out of town two different times this month. It's just been kind of one of those crazy months where I'm just really behind and everything. And I can't even tell you why. I can't

tell you what happened in a day or in a month nonetheless. But I just know it went by really fast and

wasn't particularly fun or easy or relaxing like I may have thought. The day Brad returned, for example,

from his last round of being out of town, He was out of town from very early Monday morning,

like he left at 4 in the morning and got back late Thursday night. The day he returned, I had

just the craziest morning that I shared on Instagram and everyone was like, wow, you deserve a break.

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