You know that you’ve angered someone, somewhere, when you wake up after a restful night of sleep and your child is whimpering with a temperature of 103. I’m not sure who I upset but my son was not a happy camper mid-week and this has certainly had its effect on the remainder of the week and my ability to do all sorts of things. There are lots of bad things when you have a sick child. Lots. You have to reschedule your life around the baby. You have to quickly figure out who’s going to skip work (or what babysitter you’re going to call) because the daycare doesn’t take sick babies. On this morning I was elected to stay home with the baby boy.
While I certainly don’t rejoice in my son’s sickness there are some benefits. We get to spend time together in a way that we normally aren’t able to: during the day. The primary difficulty was that Mom wasn’t going to be home. While he’s certainly starting to eat blended and soft foods (and he chokes on solids!) nursing is still his primary food source. A day without Mom was going to be hard. Luckily, Mom had thought ahead and I had some frozen breast milk at home. So, once we dropped Mom off I started thawing the breast milk and starting thinking about how I was going to take care of an unhappy baby boy.
Primarily, my son really enjoyed being carried around and constantly in motion. He was clearly uncomfortable and in some sort of constant pain, but moving helped to take his mind off of all of it. So we walked…. and walked and walked and walked. When I got tired I would sit, he would cry, and I’d stand up and walk some more. Eventually the milk had thawed and I fed him. He devoured the milk, fell asleep, and stayed that way for a while. When he woke up I took him to see Mom for some more nursing (and comfort) and we decided to stay around her for the rest of the day. His mother is his greatest comfort. Right now… he’s still sick. Hopefully he’ll be better soon.