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.”

Hook me up

I spent vast amounts of time at the end of last week and into this morning on hold with the desktop support helpdesk here at work and as of this moment I seem to have finally had a major breakthrough. Almost all of my non-busywork projects here at the agency have been on hold because they upgraded the servers that host the applications I’m responsible for, and then did not properly upgrade my machine to be able to access the new servers. In fact, they (“they” in all these instances is a semi-nebulous many-headed entity comprised of the various silos of IT responsibility, the details of which are largely unimportant) generally acted like they had no idea what it was that I needed in order to keep up with the upgrades in the first place. But long story short and at a techno-gibberish minimum, I now have what I need to do my job. Which is kind of a minor miracle.

It’s funny because just this past Friday I was having lunch with an old buddy of mine (the very one I’ve mentioned before who used to be a co-worker and fellow carpooler) and we were discussing the similarities of our career trajectories. We’re both fairly similar in our approach to work, namely that neither of us is terribly ambitious and neither of us feels that scaling the corporate ladder to dizzying heights would be worth what it would likely take out of us in return, and as a result we’re both willing to be humble cogs in positions which simply provide for us and our families in the (again, very similar) manners to which we’ve become accustomed. But at the same time we both realize that there’s an inherent danger in striking that particular attitude, namely that we run the risk of stagnating in our current positions … I guess becoming rusty cogs? If we aren’t pushing ourselves to take steps upward, or in any other direction for that matter, then if any external force should impact us we wouldn’t be very practiced in dealing with change and things could very rapidly become very grim. We were both lucky to ride out the current recession without a hitch. But any number of years (or even months) down the line we could get laid off or offered a dismal choice between quitting or, say, relocating to Alabama (no offense, Yellowhammer State!) and then we’d be adrift in the job market with resumes that boil down to “spent eight years doing not much of anything interesting in a government contracting job using antiquated technologies, because it was easy and paid the bills”. Or something like that.


It’s tempting (in a certain light) to think that I could ride this gravy train for thirty more years and then retire, but it’s entirely unlikely. So there’s a more or less constant tension between my aversion to shaking things up and hunting for a new job and my equally strong aversion to allowing my inaction to slowly but surely put me over a professional barrel. But despite all that, what’s probably going to end up settling things one way or the other will be something minor. Metro will go further into the red and double their fares, and I’ll end up looking for a new job just so I can eliminate that particular irritant from my life. Or my current contracting boss will retire and his replacement will be someone who makes my life in the office totally (as opposed to partially) soul-crushing. The whole long-term-career-strategy thing makes compelling sense, but it’s usually too abstract to wrap my head around. Whereas “something is driving me crazy and the only way I can think of to make it stop is to change jobs” has appreciably more immediate texture to it.

And funny enough, while I was talking all of this over with my buddy, it did occur to me that the lack of technical support I was getting in regards to my missing software, and the general fact that it’s hard being the only techie guy on the team and feeling like no one is helping me because in a very real sense nobody can help me due to the fact that no one remotely understands how my job should be done … all of that had me nostalgic for the days when I worked for an actual technology company and showing up to work on day one with a machine provided that was fully configured to be able to do all the things I would need it to do was kind of a given. And it occurred to me that, just maybe, if I found a new job I could end up in that kind of environment again, and that would be a strong motivator indeed. But then my software problems finally got solved today, and equilibrium has been restored, and with it the inertia that will almost certainly keep me with the same employer for the near-term. Plenty of changes coming on the home front this year to make me extra thankful for a stable job situation, however stagnant that stability may be.

Some filler

One night when I was in college I was hanging out in someone's dorm room and we all started telling jokes, meaning not just the random, had-to-be-there kind of cracking each other up but the reciting of actual structured narrative setup-punchline kind of jokes you might read in a book of jokes. (If you're the kind of person who reads joke books. Which I totally was as a youngster.) It turned out that I had a staggering number of these kinds of jokes stored away in my cluttered headspace and it gradually shifted from everyone trading jokes to me just spouting off one joke after another after another. I don't think anyone found this either endearing or amusing, not even me, but once I got started I couldn't seem to stop and I was vaguely curious how long I could keep it going. The answer turned out to be "way too long and just shy of unforgivably so" and I believe it was not too long after that I began to give serious thought to my borderline neurotic fear of long silences and learned to make peace with shutting the hell up more as a result of being mindful of what I was saying in the first place.


I bring this up because not only is it once again Random Anecdote Friday but it is also once again a Friday on which I'm planning on ditching work a little early and on which I don't have a ton of news to report or overthinking to share, which lately has led to the ol' blog going dark for lack of content. Does this post address and solve that problem, or simply use more words to accomplish the same end result as posting nothing at all? The determination is left as an exercise for the reader.

Little lessons

I’m pretty sure the cat is already out of the bag on this one, but let me cop to a slightly unexemplary parenting technique which my wife and I have adopted over the past few months. The little guy is really still technically too little to have the run of the house unsupervised, and although we’re getting more and more comfortable leaving him happily playing with his trains while we roam to other floors of our abode doing various chores, we always keep an ear out and are ready to spring in his direction at the first hint of danger or distress. What we’re not comfortable with (and I think rightly so) is letting him play on his own while we are still dozing in bed, not that we’ve discussed the fine distinctions at length but I presume it has something to do with any or all of the following: our bed is in one of the farthest corners of the house; when we do leave him unattended we check in on him frequently; the time-delay that would be associated with getting out from under the covers, up off the bed, and figuring out where exactly the little guy had gotten off to would be too great; and probably many more.

But when the little guy is awake and clamoring to be released from his crib (which, knock wood, he still can’t climb out of) and whichever parent is home with him doesn’t quite want to stop snoozing, then we often opt to bring the little guy into bed, and turn on the Disney Channel, and let him watch a cartoon or two while chilling within arm’s reach of a half-conscious mommy or daddy. It’s certainly not the most engaged parenting style I can imagine, but it keeps the child happy and the parents sane, and bottom line, it works for us.

One of the interesting side-effects of this is that, as a captive audience to the Playhouse Disney offerings in these early morning screenings, I have quickly become very familiar with various animated properties aimed more or less at my child’s demographic. I know that it’s a widely accepted piece of wisdom that parents should watch what their children are watching, at least to the point that they are not completely ignorant of what ideas/images/messages their children are consuming, but I often feel like that is vegetable-advice: something everyone knows they should be doing but no one does as much as they should. Yet through the default magic of laziness, and the fact that those early morning not-ready-to-get-up-yet hours are essentially the only time we let the little guy watch tv, I’m there for all of his video exposure so far, which has thus far been limited to Chuggington, Imagination Movers, Special Agent Oso, and Mickey’s Club House.


Oh and of course Handy Manny.

So the other day we watched the special New Years Eve episode of Handy Manny together (the little guy with rapt attention, me with my eyes half-closed) and it has been stuck in my craw ever since. Because I can’t quite figure out where the episode is supposed to be coming from philosophically. (Which of course presupposes that children’s cartoons have a philosophical point of view to begin with.)

Handy Manny has a few things to recommend it even to the parental viewer – the theme song by Los Lobos is catchy as hell, the sentient tools have a couple of amusing personality quirks amongst them (particularly Turner the Sardonic Screwdriver), the relationship between Manny and his friend Kelly is rife with unintentionally torrid sexual undertones – but by and large I find it to kind of be a mess. I sympathize with the producers of children’s entertainment who make a concerted effort to carve out some individualized ground for their show’s identity, but Handy Manny throws an awful lot into the pot. Sometimes it’s about living in a multi-lingual world, as Manny tends to say a lot of things in Spanish and then immediately translate himself into English. Sometimes it’s about teamwork and getting the job at hand done, whatever that may happen to be. Sometimes it educationally addresses various far-flung topics. Pretty often it’s all of those things at once, plus the usual kiddie-moral platitudes. That is a many-layered bean dip of not necessarily complimentary ideas!

Anyway, the New Years Eve episode starts with Manny making a custom, hand-painted ball ornament that will be dropped at midnight at the town celebration. Then it shifts into a story about how the local candy-store owner Mr. Lopart (he's the guy NOT wearing a cool trucker cap in the pic above) is going to be alone on New Years because his mother was on vacation and her flight home has been cancelled. So Mr. Lopart ends up tagging along with Manny and the tools as they help other people get ready for the celebration, and everywhere Mr. Lopart goes he manages to clumsily wreck something. All of which culminates at the end when Mr. Lopart takes it upon himself to hang Manny’s custom countdown-ball, a task which he of course screws the pooch on, resulting in a shattered ball. But Mr. Lopart replaces the ball with a star-shaped piñata he had bought for his mother, who ends up making it home by midnight for a thoroughly happy ending including a singing of a bilingual Auld Lang Syne. (Trilingual? Spanish, English and whatever weird druidic language the name of the song actually is?)

OK, so first off, Mr. Lopart is a seriously creepy character. I understand toddler-tainment needs its pitiable, accident-prone characters to give plots some semblance of conflict to resolve without resorting to the out-and-out protagonist/antagonist minefield of ideas, but the figure in question here seems a little off the deep end: a middle-aged bachelor with a bad combover and a pampered cat who is still attached at the apron strings to his mother (who is less attached herself, since she flies off for solo vacations to Mexico and all). To a certain extent my personal creep factor is beside the point, but just note again the fact that we are talking about a middle-aged man who owns his own business. He may be accident-prone, which in turn is exacerbated by his own hubris, but to a certain extent he should know better, right? When he attempts to hang up Manny’s countdown-ball, he willfully ignores the fact that he has been breaking stuff all day. And actually I can buy that, because he sees helping out with the ball as his big shot at redemption, his chance to show that he doesn’t screw up everything (which is delusional and ultimately wrong, but consistent, at least). But while he’s in the middle of his doomed attempt to help, Manny shows up AND ASKS HIM TO STOP SO THAT MANNY CAN HELP. Mr. Lopart hears this but blows it off anyway, and then the ball breaks, a situation which could have easily been avoided if he. Had. Just. LISTENED.

Holy crap, as a parent, a sequence like that is frigging infuriating. Or rather, what happens next is infuriating; to wit, nothing. People make mistakes, and mistakes are “teachable moments”, fine, but it is less than a second before Manny is saying “That’s OK, Mr. Lopart” and basically letting him off the hook with zero consequences. And I must call shenanigans on that! Because what it’s basically saying to the little kiddies is this: it’s all right to do whatever you want, even if it’s the same kind of thing that has caused trouble before, and even if someone is right in front of you telling to stop and wait and accept some help from someone who knows better than you, because no matter what the outcome of your actions everything will be just fine.

I always try to look at things from multiple perspectives, so I do see a certain amount of positive value in the premise here. It’s not the worst thing in the world to reassure pre-schoolers that the world is basically a kind and gentle place where they have the room and the safety to make all the mistakes that life-learning requires. I’d rather have a child who believes that, in the long run, everything is gonna be OK than one who freaks out whenever things get slightly bent because they believe bad will always lead to worse. But, better still, I’d like to have a child whose optimism is tempered by a sense or personal responsibility, who can heed fair warnings and defer to expertise when it’s in everyone’s best interest. I guess that has to wait until they’re older than two or three, though.

But as I said, I keep thinking about the stupid show and its problematic philosophy of “oh, it’s fine that you ignored me and as a result destroyed something I worked really hard on” and in the course of all that mental gnawing I started to develop an alternative theory. After all, Mr. Lopart is a fop and a buffoon, so maybe even the tiniest of minds wouldn’t necessarily look to him as a role model and the takeaway I’m seeing is neither intended nor received. Manny is the hero, I remind myself, and ergo the role model. So what lesson is Manny really teaching the kiddies?

Zen-like calm in the face of idiots.

I mean, the fact is, Manny did his best at every point from painting the ball to trying to save it from Mr. Lopart’s butterfingered clutches, but things went south anyway, and once that happened, you know, yelling at Mr. Lopart or punishing him in any way wouldn’t put the ball back together again. Manny is quick to forgive and move on and, I swear, I strive to be the same way myself, because just about every other approach just leads to more trouble than it’s worth. The fact is that the world is full of Mr. Loparts, numbskulls who should know better but don’t, who won’t take well-intentioned advice or accept genuinely useful help, and who muck things up for everyone else. Even with the heaviest enforcement of consequences, the world remains full of that particular breed of moron. And the best advice I can give for dealing with people like that is to accept that they will never, ever change, keep your own head on straight, and get over it. Which is exactly what Manny does.

You have no idea how much I totally want to believe that the life lesson of “do your best, and don’t let the feebs get you down no matter what” is what the Handy Manny writers were going for. Because that’s a philosophy I’m happy to have the tv impart on my little guy while I laze away beside him.

Should Old Pop Resolutions Be Forgot

Originally I was going to go point-by-point through the 10 resolutions of pop culture consumption I made heading into 2010 and examine the degree of success (or failure) for each as well as any extenuating circumstances or unforeseen complications which went along with them and furthermore declare whether or not I was making a similar resolution for 2011 to either finally accomplish what I had failed to do the previous year or to perpetuate what I saw as an inherently positive development. Yes, I was going to do this ten times.

Fortunately for all of us I have come to my senses! I wasn’t able to get the post as initially envisioned up on New Year’s Eve because it was taking too long to write, a trend which continued well into this week, and ultimately I realized if it was taking that wretchedly long for me to compose my thoughts it would be a hell of a slog for anyone to read through. Thus, new plan, let me just give you the highlights.

Almost all of my successes came in ticking off things that had the word “read” in there somewhere, once again abetted by my never-ending mass transit commute. So I read 53 books (54 and a half, technically) and a bunch of comics, including volume 1 of Akira (which was a portion of Resolution #6) and all of Blackest Night (half of Resolution #4). I found the local library and made use of it, and I bought more used books both on Amazon and at the local shops.

My nearest miss was the attempt to watch 12 Netflix movies in 12 months (Resolution #8) – I watched 11, finishing off The Wrestler on December 31st. Technically I should admit that after a year of effort I am incapable of getting my money’s worth out of my account, but five days into the new year I have yet to cancel the service. And honestly I probably won’t … but let me get back to that. I also failed to watch every DVD which is hanging around my house because I actually own it (Resolution #9), but I did view a few of them, at least. And those aren’t going anywhere (even though the bigger of the local used book stores also buys used DVDs).


Then there were the abysmal failures. The one that surprised me the most was going to the movies five times (Resolution #7) – I didn’t make to a theater once in 2010. I had to laugh when I looked back at last year’s post and saw that one of my strategic points in that arena was to take my wife to Solomon Kane starring James Purefoy – surprise! It was only released in the UK! I also had vague thoughts of moviegoing while we were at the Outer Banks if any of the days had been too rainy to hit the beach (but none really were) and catching a late show with a buddy (we ended up hanging at my house drinking beers) and, of course, seeing TRON (but then I heard it was really terrible). This year, of course, both the Green Lantern and Thor films will hit the cineplexes and there’s no way I’m missing either of those, so going to the movies more this year than last is already a gimme.

One of the other failures came down to dollars. It’s not that my family is hurting for money (a significant rework of our household budget is a pressing non-popcult resolution for this year in light of the imminent addition to our family, but still, we should be fine if we stay on top of things) but I did find myself reluctant to blow unreasonable amounts of money on any single thing. Like, for instance, Star Blazers on DVD (the other part of Resolution #6) which I had casually declared my intention to acquire when I figured the box set would be, like, 40 bucks. Turns out it’s a pause-giving 135 smackers or so. I can wait a while on that.

But mostly, it’s about time ... or lack thereof. Playing all the way through a Guitar Hero game (Resolution #10)? That was easy when the little guy was a newborn who slept throughout the day and we lived in a small, nothing-in-urgent-need-of-fixing townhouse. Not so much now. The same more or less applies to the more ambitious project-oriented stuff like actually deciding how much more monthly comic book collecting I want to do (as it happened, I just kind of stopped buying comics after Blackest Night because getting to the comic book shop was too much effort) or selling off portions of my existing collection – the necessary hours to really figure those things out never quite presented itself. So Resolutions #4 and #5 are still sitting there waiting for me to have time for them … and also awaiting a little technical assistance.

We are on the brink of a bit of a computer crisis at my house, with our desktop only able to boot up in Safe Mode and my big laptop barely able to hold a charge or keep the adapter in its socket – and both of those machines are antiquated (relatively speaking) in terms of both processing power and OS and so on. Our netbook still works fine, so that’s the most reliable means my wife and I have for checking e-mail and such at home. Clearly we simply need to suck it up and buy at least (and for now, probably only) one new machine, and we are in agreement on this, so now it’s a matter of making it happen.

Dollars and hours. It always comes down to them.

But I’m looking forward to settling that matter because so much is logically connected to it. I think I could actually watch more Netflix and get my money’s worth if I actually made use of the streaming Watch It Now feature, which I’ve never really had a computer capable of doing before. The old desktop started dying shortly after I finally got a scanner, which you may or may not remember was one of the prerequisites to me selling off comics to begin with – I wanted to be able to scan parts of them one last time before parting with them. Then selling off the old comics will help me clarify my thoughts on collecting new ones, or net me enough pocket money to splurge on serialized Japanese cartoon box sets, and so on and so on and so on. Thus, I look forward to the new investment in our family’s computer infrastructure, and the golden dawn of productivity and efficiency (both mostly related to entertaining myself, but still) it will usher in.

Oh, and as far as my new reading goals, I’m going for quality over quantity this year – I’m only committing myself to a dozen books, but they are going to be legitimate, canonized classics which I have managed to get this far without reading. Of course I will intersperse other, lighter fare throughout the year, but altogether the total number most likely will be smaller because some of the novels I’m targeting (Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment) are awfully dense. I’m sure I’ll post updates on that particular project as the year goes along.

Updates and Observations

I am at work, not because the little guy staged a dramatic recovery and was deemed good-to-go for daycare, but rather because Grandma was kind enough to come up to our place this morning and watch the little guy while both his mother and I are at work. The little guy is still pretty darn sick. He has a Dreaded Ear Infection and was prescribed ten days of antibiotics by the pediatrician yesterday. Apparently his tubes have finally fallen out (or completely disintegrated or something) and if the current infection is a precursor to yet another pattern of recurrence, we might have to subject him to the same surgery yet again, which is nerve-wracking but absolutely worth it … we’ll cross that bridge &c.

So, bummer that it’s not simply the egregiously nasty common cold I pegged it as, but there are many, many ways this could be worse. The tubes lasted and did their job way longer than the doctors had initially predicted (I think they said they’d last 12 months max and they ended up staying put and working something like 18), part of that job being not just keeping the little guy healthier but also giving him enough pain-free time to learn how to sleep through the night. He’s been waking up at odd hours the past few days, but the direct culprit has been a nagging cough, not skullsplitting pain behind his eardrums. Coughing fits tend to go away quickly with a drink of water (or, in extremis, a lollipop) and a little parental soothing, whereas those agonizingly painful ear infections of yesteryear were harder to ameliorate and it always seemed like an eternity before the infant Motrin kicked in. The pediatrician prescribed an antibiotic that the little guy has been on before, which leads us to believe that it’s a minor infection (as these things go) as opposed to something major which needs to be treated as aggressively as possible. And the little guy likes the antibiotic, so giving him his medicine doesn’t turn into a hardcore toddler-wrestling cage match. Like I say, could be worse.


I am working on a belated New Year’s Pop Resolutions post which will call back to everything I resolved to do back on the last day of 2009, measure my progress over 2010, and look ahead to 2011, but I don’t think I’ll get it done today. So in the meantime, speaking of callbacks, I just wanted to do my usual mini-review-type-thing for one of the sitcoms I follow regularly, How I Met Your Mother. Spoilers ahead!

The two most noteworthy aspects of last night’s episode were the running countdown gimmick, where the numbers from 50 to 1 appeared prominently on screen, and the death of Marshall’s dad revealed in the final minute. The countdown gimmick was a cool hook and my wife and I had a lot of fun playing Spot The Digits and pointing them out to one another. The ending was affecting enough to not only get both of us a little misty (my wife at least has the hormonal excuse of being pregnant, I’m just a sap for father/son loss stories) but to prompt my brother-in-law to almost immediately text my wife to remark on how sad it was. These two aspects obviously go hand-in-hand and overall I’d say they worked and made for a quality episode.

I was surprised this morning, trawling the interwebs message boards as I am wont to do, to find that it was a really divisive episode. Lots of people liked it as much as I did, and lots of other people hated it and thought the gimmick was distracting in and of itself AND did a disservice to the emotional coda of the episode AND also thought the death of Marshall’s dad was a cheap trick that should have been handled totally differently. Ah well, to each his own.

As I read through a long page of comments I noticed that no one was pointing out a little detail I noticed. It’s not something I think definitively settled the god ep/bad ep question, but I liked it so I’m going to mention it here because that is after all one of the reasons I blog in the first place, to give cybervoice to my random synapse signals. The last shot of the episode, after Lily tells Marshall that his father died, was Marshall and Lily hugging on the sidewalk, and the frame very deliberately included an electronic parking meter, and the display screen of the meter was red, which is an indicator that time has expired. Of course before the screen turns red it’s a countdown of how much time remains. And “expired” has a specific meaning for human life, as well. OK, maybe not exactly a piece of symbolism you could bang out an entire five-pager on for an Advanced television Studies seminar, but I thought it was a well-placed button on the whole gimmick/revelation thing.

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.