Sickos

The boys are sick, I guess. I’ve been fortunate with the boys and colds. Some children go through a perpetual state of colds as their immune system acts more like a germ hotel concierge. Some kids enjoy long stretches of good health, and short yet painful stretches of illness. You know when these kids are sick because no one, especially the parents, sleeps when they’re sick.

The boys, and Abbie for that matter, have robust immune systems. They rarely catch colds, which is a blessing since, according to my mother, I attracted germs like dog hair to a Tasteeo. I had multiple operations to insert tubes in my ears, and kept my poor mother awake through the night several times screaming from the pain of infected ears. No wonder I was an only child.

I think this is the second cold the boys have caught in their lifetimes. Much like the first one, it exists within their bodies, specifically their noses, without causing much anguish. Except for a mild increase in crankiness and major increases in snot and drool, I wouldn’t be able to tell they were sick. They’d just go about their daily lives with major sinus pain, and I’d incorrectly attribute every meltdown to an exhaustion of the Tasteeo supply.

Of course, both boys catch the same cold at the same time. I don’t even try to keep their germs separate. There’s too much germ swapping to care about the little things. If I cared, I’d feed them with separate utensils from separate bowls, but it’s not worth the bother. They swap sippy cups. They drool and snot on their cow blankets and throw them into each other’s cribs. They tackle each other and shove their snotty extremities into each other’s mouths and eyes in an infantile version of germ warfare. Miraculously, Abbie hasn’t contracted the cold yet despite their repeated efforts to steal and muckify her lambie blanket.

The worst time to deal with their colds is nighttime. Again, they’re not awful about sleeping through colds, especially since modern cold medicines are so much more powerful and sedative than the ones available when I was a child. They still wake up at night, though.

They’re ordinarily great sleepers. As soon as they give up and fall asleep at night, they stay asleep until morning when they sense that I’m almost ready to step in the shower. Ian had been waking up around midnight for a few nights, though. It wasn’t too big of a deal; I’d walk him around for a minute, just long enough for me to fumble with the acetaminophen bottle in the dark, give him a dose of painkiller in case he had any pain to be killed, and set him back down. He’d roll around for a minute, depositing any extraneous drool on his cow blanket, and drift back to sleep until morning.

Last night Ian slept while Tory took the night waking shift. He popped up around 12:30, I did the acetaminophen dance, and he went back to sleep. At 2:30, he woke up again. This time I went for the diphenhydramine because clearly he needed its drying effects and I needed its tranquilizing effects. He went back to sleep, only to again wake two hours later at 4:30. It had been four hours, so I gave him another dose of acetaminophen, and he again went back to sleep. At 6:30 I ignored his complaints for a minute and he went back to sleep on his own.

That makes four nighttime wakings. He didn’t even do that as a newborn. I know it could’ve been worse, such as one long nighttime waking. My mother can tell you I used to do that.