Wampanoag's Revenge

The long weekend is drawing to a close, and it has in fact been a long weekend, as the bulk of our observations of Thanksgiving revolved (perhaps historically appropriately enough) around germs trying to kill us. I don't think I identified the malady earlier, but the little girl's fever was brought on by a nasty case of strep throat, which was diagnosed on Wednesday, at which point she started a course of antibiotics. According to the pediatrician, she would no longer be contagious within about 24 - 48 hours of starting the antibiotics, so between Thursday and Friday evening. That put the kibosh on driving down to my inlaws' on Thanksgiving Day, but we figured we could reschedule, my wife's mother could delay cooking the great big bird for another day or so, and we could have a belated Thanksgiving dinner together on Friday (possibly) or Saturday (more likely).

So on Friday the little girl had a bit of a fever and had not really slept well the night before, and thus we resolved to stay put and do our holiday traveling/celebrating on Saturday. We all made it through the day on Friday relatively uneventfully and went to bed, woke up Saturday morning and started in on a quick breakfast before hitting the road.

Right after Saturday breakfast, before we started cracking the whips on getting dressed and so forth, the little guy crawled into my lap on the couch and told me he didn't feel good. And we had a fairly drawn out conversation about how his sister had been getting a lot of attention the past few days because she was sick, and I would understand if he felt jealous and wanted some attention to, but it was important to tell the truth and know the difference between feeling sad and feeling sick. He insisted he really did feel sick. And displaying the flair for showmanship that my children evince all the time, he got up off my lap, walked to the dead center of the living room rug, put his hands on his knees, and proceeded to hork up all the bananas and milk he had just consumed for breakfast.

Even before I could process what had just happened and get up to fetch a bucket and some paper towels, my wife very definitively announced, "Well, we're not going anywhere today." And not that it does anything but break my heart to see my kids laid low by illness, but I admit there is something reassuring in a parental decision being a circumstantial no-brainer. My wife and I tend to agonize over decisions that could go either way, and parse every aspect of how far along the "on the mend" curve each child is situated as we try to predict whether or not taking them somewhere (or more often and to the point, getting them back home again late at night) is worth the potential aggravation. But there was no discussion necessary this time; Thanksgiving was officially cancelled.

The weekend wasn't a total loss, I hasten to add. We had a pretty magnificent little family feast on Thursday night consisting of stuffed shells and ribeye steaks and homemade creamed spinach (two-thirds of which was whipped up by my wife; I trust you all to identify which segment was my contribution). Friday night was pretty typical fare, too, but then on Saturday my wife roasted a whole chicken to go along with the crock pot dressing and homemade macaroni and cheese she had been preparing in advance of visiting her parents, and which now fell to us to put to good use.

The little guy rallied almost right away (after enjoying the invalid's benefit of having the entire den couch to himself all morning while he watched about a half dozen episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse) and the little girl finally slept through the night last night, for the first time in a week or so, and it therefore seems (knock holy hell out of wood) that we've run the gauntlet once again and things are getting back to normal, just in time for my wife to go do some vet work at the animal shelter today, and me to return to the Big gray tomorrow.

And it's still only November.