A wee bit poxy

Last night, after the kids were in bed, my wife and I had a late dinner consisting of her homemade chili and a beer for me, wine for her. Ostensibly this was in honor of father’s day but it was a treat for both of us, especially my wife who has been making a conscious effort lately to cut out unnecessary carbs from her diet, and of course alcoholic beverages are very much in that category. But we felt that the treat last night was well-deserved because, oof, what a week last week and weekend turned out to be.

I believe at various points I’ve extolled the virtues of our current, in-home daycare arrangement for the two younger kids, a major one being that without dunking the baby in the petri dish of an infant room on the regular, he’s barely been sick at all. He’s the only one of the three offspring who’s made it to 15 months on this earth without anyone bringing up the subject of surgically inserting drainage pipes in his ears. The other edge of the sword, however, is that he hasn’t really been inoculated against the wide, wonderful world of germs. He will be, since we’re planning on putting him and his sister in a traditional daycare center come fall. And it’s a bit easier (less nerve-wracking) to deal with a sick toddler than a sick itty-bitty infant, so all well and good that we’ve delayed it this long. With the possible exception of this past week.

The little guy stayed home sick from school both Tuesday and Wednesday last week. He had a fever and was a bit off his game, but nothing too major. However, he passed it on to both siblings, and the real fun started Thursday night, when the bino refused to sleep at all between about midnight and 3:30 a.m. I had been planning on leaving work early on Friday, because the little guy had an end-of-kindergarten show at school I wanted to attend; I ended up bagging the whole day because there was no way I could get back up and start getting ready to drive in to work as of 5 a.m. We all ended up making it to the show, and then came back home, and then during dinner the bino got explosively ill. Somehow we got everything cleaned up and everyone to bed.

So our littlest was very sedate on Saturday while the other two seemed more or less fine. We cancelled some dinner plans we had made for Saturday night, and we got the bino to bed early and let the little guy and little girl stay up and watch a movie as per the Saturday night norm. We hoped things would get back to normal on Sunday but by then the little girl had a fever, and tossed up the previous night’s dinner (while sitting on my lap, naturally), then got sick again a couple of hours later, and proceeded to sleep away most of the afternoon. She seemed much better when she woke up later in the day but wasn’t enthusiastic about dinner, understandably. And of course whenever my wife or I would make reference to her being sick and how we needed to get her to do certain things (sit still to have her temperature taken, swallow bubble-gum flavored ibuprofen, &c.) as a result, she would indignantly respond “I’m not sick!” She’s a willful one.

(Incidentally, the ibuprofen was not such a hard sell once my wife flipped the script. The liquid medicine is pink and meant to be measured into and drunk from the little cuplike cap, and my wife told my daughter that it was a tiny teacup like a fairy would drink from at a party. The little girl was right on board with that.)

So, while I’ve tried to avoid delving too deep into the grody details, I rest my case that after three, four, five, six days of one kid or another being sick we felt we were due a little indulgence by Sunday night. (And did I mention that both of the dogs were messily unwell over the course of the week, too? You’d think we were keeping the chosen people of a vengeful deity as slaves the way the multifarious plagues descended on our household.) I’d like to say the good news is that things are on the upswing, but apparently the bino had a bit of a relapse this morning, so who knows. This could be another rocky week and the blog may or may not be running at full speed for the duration. Updates to follow.