Sick Weekend

I should have been posting photos of our weekend in Atlanta to witness a friend's baby's Baptism and a niece's First Holy Communion, but the morning we were to leave, John woke up sick. Two years and four months is a pretty good run before his having his first fever-and-vomiting illness! Mama is sick too, but it never got as bad as John's.

Sweet boy slept for the first 18 hours, waking hourly for the latter half of that to nurse and fall back into deep sleep. His fever hovered at 102 degrees. Never had I been so happy to see his cheerful, overloud self the first time that his fever broke and instead of his waking up to dry heaving and weeping, he leapt out of bed, gleefully grabbed the digital thermometer, and began running around the house exclaiming, "I got it! I got it!" and beeping the normally forbidden toy.

John went off food for 48 hours and was refusing to drink water almost that entire time too, which normally might have sent us to the Emergency Room. Thanks to a tip from my friend Elaine, John was enticed to eat about eight ounces of ice chips, but that was all. John won't drink anything besides water so when I tried to get him to drink unflavored Pedialyte, he took a sip, screwed up his face, and said accusingly, "Mama, that's juice!" Otherwise he lived on the liquid, calories, and major antibodies of nursing hourly for those couple of days and he showed no signs of dehydration.

I've heard that this illness is sweeping through our city's children and the fever of 102-103 lasts for five to seven days. If John had the same thing, it looks like John beat it after only 24 hours of acute sickness, which is great! I'll still be keeping us at home in quarantine for a little while longer. If more parents would keep their sick or recently sick kids home, this stuff would spread less! We went to three "kid events" last week and I don't know from where we caught it, but we were very disappointed to miss those special sacraments in Atlanta over the weekend.