Anticipation

No time to blog yesterday as I was home with the little guy, who had a rough day at daycare on Monday. How rough was it? His mother and I routinely bemoan the challenges he sometimes embodies for us in terms of napping (when we would like him to and how much we would like him to, not least because he really does seem to feel better when he gets that two-hour midday recharge) and eating (balanced meals as opposed to just fruit, and sitting at a table instead of wandering with food in hand and/or mouth) and said bemoaning is given an extra piquancy every time we get the daily report from daycare that says he napped like an angel and ate like a polite little health-conscious gourmand. But on Monday the report came in no uncertain terms: the little guy had barely eaten or slept and was less than his usual sunny self, complaining of ear and throat pain. Tuesday was immediately deemed a stay-at-home day with a pediatrician appointment to be made at first opportunity in the morning.

And I did just that, and they couldn’t see us until 3:15 in the afternoon, but at least that afforded us the luxury of a lazy beginning to the day. Still, I spent the day looking forward to meeting with the doctor and getting something in exchange, in the form of a modified diagnosis or a major course correction in treatment or something along those lines, since we were at the eight-day mark with little to no signs of improvement. What I actually got was some but not all of the above. The doctor confirmed the ear infection was getting better but still there, wrote a new prescription for different antibiotics, and added some chewable pills (a first for the little guy but he seems fine with them) which are to help with his coughing at bed time. She also indicated the small but extant possibility that the little guy might have fallen victim to a pertussis outbreak sweeping through the area, but when I relayed this to my wife later she reminded me that the little guy has already had a vaccine for that, so … probably not. In the end of course it was the right thing to do to take him to the doctor and I’m glad I did, but it was a little less than revelatory. “Our kid is still sick!” “Yup, he sure is. Here’s some slightly different medicine, come back if it doesn’t get better in two weeks.” Good times.


On the other hand I was also keeping an eye on the skies, as it were, since they were calling for snow in the area and while only an inch or so was forecast I certainly do not believe in the infallibility of meteorologists. Which meant anything from no snow at all to a six-inch ice blanket could have been in the offing, and all I could do was wait and see what exactly would happen. What did happen was a nearly negligible amount of accumulation which didn’t grow much overnight, although I was abed while it was still coming down and could have conceivably turned into more. I know I had no logical reason to hope for a snow day on the heels of a child’s sick day, but that particular habit dies so hard it is functionally immortal. The upside is that the snowfall wasn’t even enough to make the morning commute at all remarkable, so it didn’t become a full-blown worst-of-both-worlds scenario.

In short, I spent a lot of yesterday wondering about things like “Has my son’s illness progressed into troubling complications?” and “Are we going to get much snow?” and the answer to both turned out to be “Not so’s you’d notice.”