The tree arrived in our home fully furnished with golden ribbons, red and gold balls, red and gold glittery branches, and white Christmas lights. The minis enjoyed inspecting and playing with the decorations and accessories, but I love how the everything stayed beautifully together despite my kids’ constant touching, pulling and twirling.
Since it’s been two months since Christmas and because I noticed that mosquitoes are starting to live in the tree, A and I finally decided to take the tree down on the first day of the long Chinese New Year weekend. While A drove the minis to their grandparents’ house, I went on to disassembling the tree myself.
That’s when I found out why the accessories held on so firmly on the tree — the strings and stems were intertwined and hooked on the tree and each other! So, I had to go into the tree to unhook and untangle each piece then slowly pull one accessory at a time from the tree.
Dust and glitters would rain on me every time I pulled a piece. So, hours later, I started to feel an itch in my throat. I’m not super sensitive to dust, but I sometimes tend to get red and itchy skin as well as a sore throat followed by a bad cough when I am exposed to it. I didn’t think I’d have a reaction when I disassembled the tree, but I did. 🙁
As I said, it started with an itch in my throat. I just drank warm water to wash my throat, which worked… at first. The next day, I woke up with a husky voice. Come afternoon, I completely lost my voice. Imagine my horror!
The first thing that came to mind was, “How will I control the minis without my voice?!” Seriously, I was worried about that. Hehe! I’m the kind of mom who’d talk the kids out of unsafe or naughty things they are doing. If I can talk, then how can I talk them out!
Thankfully, it was a long weekend so Arjay came to the rescue. He took charge of the minis and the rest of my homemaking duties. If you were wondering why I was blogging so often over the weekend, well, that’s because A gave me a weekend off on my own so I can rest and hopefully, get well before he goes back to work.
I still don’t feel the best today, but I have a bit of my voice back. Unfortunately, I am not having the best of luck in getting the minis to cooperate. Well, The Princess listens when I tell her to behave because Mommy is not feeling well, but The Little Man is being very difficult. I think he’s entering the tantrum-throwing stage. He’s a hard case because he tends to hold his breath when he cries. I wrote about breath holding spells here in case you want to know more about it. His spells are not as bad as before, but he still does it.
Anyway. I’m drinking lots of warm water and gargling salt mixed with warm water every four hours (this works great for coughs and colds too, fyi). Hopefully, this will do the trick! If you have home remedies for my lost voice, do let me know in the comments section below. If you have a little one who has breath-holding spells, do share how you handle it!