A happy, healthy New Year ... not so much

Well that went by fast. Unfortunately my day off on Friday coincided with the little guy developing one nasty little cold, one which manifested especially heavily Friday night when the little guy was trying, and failing, to sleep. My wife and I had more or less given up on making it to midnight on New Year’s Eve but somehow found ourselves awake as the calendar rolled on over, with a coughing, sniffling, fairly miserable two-year-old sharing our bed after he had made it abundantly clear he had no intention of going quietly back to sleep. So that was ... kinda neat?


The three-of-us-in-one-bed didn’t last terribly long, though. We used to do that a lot more when the little guy was sick with ear infections as a tiny tot, but the main reason we did it back then was because it actually worked. Snuggled up against his mommy, he would sleep much better than if we left him alone in his crib (still not perfect, mind you, but better) so we indulged him. Nowadays he doesn’t get sick nearly as often but when he does, and it’s the kind of sick that can potentially wake him up in the middle of the night and lead to him wailing with displeasure and inability to settle himself back down, then it seems like we go through the same set of steps every time:

-My wife and I lie awake listening to him crying down the hall, hoping a few more bawls and he’ll run out of steam and drift back to sleep
- He keeps bawling longer than our hair-trigger consciences can abide, and we fetch him into our bed
- He calms down fairly quickly, but rather than falling back asleep he tries talking to us, playing with us (manhandling our faces mostly), and generally disrupting any and all attempts at slumber.
- At which point our need for sleep and realization that he is way too old for what worked when he was eight months old kicks in, and we return him to his crib.
- Where he immediately starts wailing again but at least at that point we have extremely fresh memories reminding us of what we had apparently forgotten in the previous interim from the last time he was sick: it sucks to listen to him cry but it does eventually subside into sleep, and putting him in our bed might seem like a good way to avoid the crying but it also completely precludes sleep in its own way.

So yeah, that was New Years Eve, and on New Years Day we variously cancelled on people we had made plans with because the little guy was leaking even more snot and eye goop and was an undeniably mess. He actually seemed to feel fine enough most of the time, running around the house, playing, eating well, but there were moments now and then where it was obvious his internal systems were operating at less than ideal efficiency.

We toughed it out through the weekend, though, and managed to de-Christmas most of the house (though the little guy prevailed upon me to leave the musical Frosty plush doll out a while longer, and I caved) and now here we are back to the post-holiday grind. Although it remains to be seen if this really will be the grim, full-five-day week that it promises to be. I might be forced to take a my-child-is-sick day tomorrow if the little guy is still too effluvial to be welcomed at daycare with open arms.