November 2, 2010 2:08 pm

Carrying on the tradition

I have a history of being sick on major holidays. My mom will tell you about the time a feverish, cranky 18-month-old me was forced to hunt for easter eggs; the time I got a nosebleed all over my grandma’s hand-crocheted pillow during Christmas; and the time the whole family got the flu over Thanksgiving.

What sticks out the most for me is the time I got very, very ill during Halloween. I was probably eight or nine years old and Aladdin was pretty popular, so I decided to be the genie for Halloween. I had a pair of “hammer pants” with a very 90s purple-and-blue print that I called my “Genie pants” and wore all the time anyway; a blue sweatshirt; gold fabric wrist cuffs; and a plastic genie lamp of my brother’s from some Aladdin-themed toy set.

My mom painted my face blue, which was a comedy of errors since she initially applied the face paint very, very liberally and I was upset that the paint was so dark. We tried to figure out how to take most of it off without taking ALL of it off and even though I didn’t love the result, I ran with it anyway. (What could I do? I was eight.)

Since we lived in the country, we’d either decide to start in the city and work our way home, or start in our neighborhood and work our way into the city, finishing with my grandparents and great-grandmother’s house. This particular Halloween we went with the latter.

I started feeling kind of bad when we started trick-or-treating. I thought maybe the paint was making me feel weird, but I soldiered on. About halfway through, I told my mom I didn’t feel very good. My brothers wanted to keep trick-or-treating, and I still seemed mostly okay so we kept going. I kept deteriorating, to the point that my brothers took my candy bag up to the houses for me because I couldn’t leave the van.

By the time we finally reached my great-grandma’s house, I was laid out in the middle seat of the mini-van feeling like I was going to die. I didn’t get out of the car. I didn’t even sit up.

Thus started a multi-day bout of some kind of stomach flu, and while I don’t remember specifics, I do remember how dreadfully awful I felt sitting in the van by myself during what was supposed to be a sugar-filled fun fest.

So it should come as no surprise that Wesley was feverish and sluggish for his first Halloween.

Way to carry on the tradition, little buddy.

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November 1, 2010 2:38 pm

The Sickness

In stark contrast to the previous weekend, this last weekend was great! We didn’t try to do too much on Saturday, just got coffee/chai, so we could hole up at home and just hang out.

Yesterday, once Wesley went down for his morning nap, he slept for THREE HOURS. This is… unusual. Lately he’s been napping for shorter lengths, 45 minutes or an hour, so I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. I ended up writing a bunch of stuff in his baby book and putting a million photos into a photo album, as well as clean up the sewing mess from Halloween and taking a shower.

He was hot when he woke up, but he often is. I didn’t think too much of it until I talked to Daniel at the end of his shift and he said Wesley probably had a fever since he was pretty sure he had one – he just felt “off” all day and felt freezing cold but was burning up. I took Wesley’s temperature and, sure enough, 101.4. Poor little bub.

Daniel came home from work and looked DREADFUL. He kept falling asleep on the couch (at 7pm!) so I sent him to bed, put Wesley to sleep, got some stuff ready for work and went to bed myself.

Today, Daniel is still dreadful and is having someone cover his shift. We kept Wesley home from daycare to recover and not infect others, but OMG. Remind me never to do this again. Solo parenting a sick baby while working from home while your compatriot is napping it off in the other room is NO FUN AT ALL. DO NOT RECOMMEND.

It’s a good thing they are both cute.

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October 25, 2010 1:30 pm

Averages

One of the more frustrating things about barely seeing my baby during the week is this: If he has a “bad” day (cranky, poor napping) on the weekend, I don’t get the benefit of the rest of the week to average it out.

Wesley had the sort of day yesterday where I honestly feel like I spent the entire day trying to get him to nap. He was clearly very, very tired but wouldn’t fall asleep, and the rare couple of times he did fall asleep he took ridiculously short 20-30 minute naps.

Then it was hard to get him to go down for the night because he hadn’t slept much all day. He would fall asleep, I would make it from the living room to the bedroom with him, and as soon as he sensed he was near the crib he was wide awake again.

After succeeding in my multiple attempts to FINALLY get him into the crib asleep, Daniel came home from the grocery store and started rustling the paper bags to fold and put away and Wesley woke up SCREAMING like monsters were eating him. Back to the living room we went to sit and rock and nurse and jiggle.

I didn’t get to go to bed until after 11:30pm and Wesley wanted to eat at 12 and 2 and then was wide awake after his 4-something feeding for no good reason and proceeded to keep me awake by screaming in my face every couple of minutes or so for about an hour, at which point I had to get up to take a shower because I missed taking one the night before. So! I am very tired. (Teething again? Maybe?)

It sucks not only because I am a zombie today, but since we were out-and-about on Saturday, yesterday’s mess was basically my whole weekend with him. I don’t get the benefit of having six other days of him being mostly pleasant to average out one day of crankiness.

I find myself getting resentful that he’s being a bum and then I get resentful that I’m being resentful and then I get angry that I’m even IN this situation and it makes the zombie-me very unhappy.

If I were at home with him, I’d figure we could try to sleep in the next day and either way, it’s not a make-or-break situation. As is, I get to hope that daycare puts him down for naps appropriately and I have the lingering memory of him screaming at me during the night to keep me going during the week. Not so good.

I cherish the time I have with him on weekends because it’s the only time I get to really hang out with him and see what he’s like – most weekdays involve me hustling home and wolfing a bowl of cereal for dinner so I can play with him for twenty minutes before he needs to get ready for bed.

I’m mostly bummed that I feel like I didn’t get enough “quality time” with him and now I’ll have to wait until the next weekend to try again.

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