Immunity

So how are the two adorable little munchkins who live at the same address as me? They are both good, and yet both not-so-good, and (as may go without saying) manage to embody those inherent contradictions in different ways.

Let’s start with the little girl, who is growing like crazy and weighed seventeen and a half pounds at the doctor’s office yesterday and if I were still in the habit of handing out blogonyms would probably be christened Armbreaker McFrillybutt as a more or less permanent measure. She has reached the stage of grabbing everything within a one-foot radius that’s not nailed down and shoving it in her mouth, and she can pretty much sit upright and unaided indefinitely (or until she lunges at something and faceplants). She is also making the first limb-flailing overtures toward crawling which means we need to start planning on serious babyproofing soon. Note: this modicum of awareness will probably not prevent us from waiting until the first time she scoots over to a floor lamp and nearly pulls it down before we actually go ahead and perform said baby-proofing.

She is also babytalk-babbling up a storm and has decided that of all the pets she likes the kitten the best (although her big brother is still far and away the apple of her eye) and between that and all the aforementioned physical mass-gaining and motor control-refining she is doing quite well indeed. On the other hand, she’s a little under the weather at the moment. Not so’s you’d notice, not during the day at any rate, but she has a persistent cough which of course gets worse when she’s horizontal. So now, after months of managing to reverse-spoil her own parents by being an excellent sleeper, she is physically unable to stay asleep through the night, as she wakes herself up hacking up phlegm and gets understandably upset about it. That’s been a bit rough, much moreso on my wife than me since this started over the weekend and has stretched (so far) into my wife’s usual day off on Monday and an impromptu day off on Tuesday.

Because on the other hand we have the little guy, who is also a constant delight in his mad dash toward getting bigger and bigger but who is also stricken with some kind of viral bug that has given him a low grade fever ever since Thursday (with spiking monets of high-grade in there too for funsies). Our daycare has pretty strict rules about kids not coming to the center while they have a fever or for 24 hours thereafter, so the little guy didn’t go to school last Friday, instead staying home with me. Nor did he go today, and because he had a fever today it looks like he won’t be going tomorrow either. He usually stays home with my wife on Thursdays, so we’re hoping this thing burns itself out between now and then and he can just get back to his normal routine on Friday. It hasn’t been that difficult for him or us from the afflicted/nursemaid perspective, honestly: there have been stretches here and there where the little guy has clearly been a little off his game, including taking a three-hour afternoon nap yesterday (after seemingly giving up the practice of napping at home for good weeks if not months ago) and a couple of nights ago informing his mother and me that he was tired and wanted to go to bed as soon as possible, which was mind-blowingly unprecedented. But once he goes down for the night, he sleeps pretty deeply, as opposed to the insomnia plaguing his sister. And for the most part he seems like his usual self and when we ask him how he feels he either says “better” (if he remembers he’s supposed to be sick) or simply “great”.

My wife took both the kids to the doctor yesterday but got a very non-committal non-diagnosis. On the one hand, that’s frustrating, but on the other hand, it’s actually good news: something very specific could be very scary, but generic “childhood crud” is a reasonably benign condition that we know from experience clears up on its own. It’s just bad luck that both our kids seem to have gotten different germs which manifest in different symptoms (the little girl has yet to spike a temperature, and the little guy hasn’t coughed once) at the exact same time.

Tomorrow will be my turn to stay home with the kids (or kid, possibly, if it seems like a good idea to drop the baby off at daycare and devote all my attention to keeping the little guy from going bonkers stir-crazy) and I will check in if at all possible. But we all know my track record on that front speaks for itself (or not, as the case may be).