The boys are getting sick. Sally and I have both had nose and throat colds so of course the boys are going to get them. Adam is particularly bad. He’s wheezy, boogery, and tired. One minute he’s happy, one minute he’s not. If it’s not him, it’s Zach. When the boys are sick nobody has fun.
That’s why tonight was so surprising. When we picked the boys up at day care they both erupted into fits. Crying, flailing arms, blowing noses, the whole bit. Nobody wanted to wear their jacket, nobody wanted to sit in their car seat. Luckily the ride home was quiet as the boys caught a nap. Adam actually caught an extended nap and decided to sleep after we brought him home, took his car seat out of the car, and put him in the living room to “thaw out”. While Adam was thawing Sally fed Zach while I prepped the rest of their dinner.
Zach was in a good mood for dinner – he must have been hungry at day care and I’m sure the nap in the car was helpful. He gobbled down carrots, green beans, and cereal as if his stomach didn’t end and smiled the whole way through. Adam finally thawed and that’s where I thought things were going to get ugly. He woke up and I took him out of his car seat and tried to console him. He wanted none of it. He pursed his lips and cried a wheezy cry that made him sound like a duck. He wanted Mommy.
I continued feeding Zach while Sally made an attempt at feeding Adam, which resulted in a tantrum. I didn’t see this evening going well, but suddenly things started looking up. Sally took Adam for a walk around the house for a few minutes and he calmed down. She started feeding him puffs and he seemed interested, interested enough to sit in the high chair again and start to eat (without a bib, that was out of the question). Before we knew it, we had two happy babies with full bellies.
We decided to give Adam a bath with some vapor bath in it to help clear his nose and help him calm down. I prepped the water and Sally brought him in. I was expecting him to sit and splash as he’s usually pretty tired when he is sick but by that point he was an entirely different baby. All he wanted to do was stand up in the tub, then sit, then stand, then splash in the bubbles, then stand again. He investigated the whale bumper we have on the water spout, the shower head hanging from its hose, the flexible cup we use for rinsing. He was having a blast. When he was finally done, I dried him off, put him in PJs, and brought him to the living room to join his brother.
Now usually when Adam is sick and clingy, he doesn’t want to play on the floor by himself. I figured all of his bath energy was because of the water and by this point he would be getting tired. He wouldn’t want to play and would just want to go to bed. It was 6:30. We’d nebulize him, give him his bottle, and he’d be up to bed by 7:00 PM. Boy was I wrong.
I don’t know what got in to him, both of them! After the nebulizer Adam was energized. He spent the next hour and a half crawling all over his toys chatting to himself. Zach was no different. He sat in front of his toys and picked them up one by one to inspect, providing a jibber-jabbering narrative as he did so. Adam chased the cats and the dogs. Zach clanged the toys together and giggled. At one point we decided that they had to be getting tired so they would want their bed time bottles. They chugged those down and it was back to play time.
We didn’t get them to bed until 9:00 PM tonight, which is quite late for their standards, but I’ve got to say that this was one of the best nights we’ve had. The boys were full of energy and just wanted to have fun. They were a little needy here and there (they’re both going through Mommy stage), but overall it was a relaxing and fun night with our sons. Certainly more than we expected, especially when they are both getting sick. I’d take another one of these nights anytime.
Relatively Ambitious 