If you have been following the blog you may have known that Grayson has been battling an interesting little stomach bug that manages to make his gross looking poop smell like delicious buttery popcorn. It truly has been a very confusing time trying to get my sense of sight and smell to agree on the relative nastiness of the whole situation. This little bug was going on for about two weeks, and we were beginning to worry that it would never go away, and that our house would forever smell like a movie theater lobby, no matter how many times our pediatrician told us to shut up, stop worrying, and stop calling. Things were beginning to look better, but then it was time to pack up and head to CT for the holidays.
We chose to drive with Grayson to CT because of our complete lack of faith in the airlines. We (mostly me) were utterly terrified about how the little guy would take to travelling. Turns out he has no problem sleeping for really long car rides, not matter what time of day, and hotel beds are way more fun to play on than the floor at home. On Friday I chose to sit in back with Grayson to play with him for a little. Grayson tends to think of my fingers as lollipops, so when he grabbed my hand and stuck it in his mouth I expected some licking , and sucking, but not pain. What do you know, the kid has decided to grow some teeth during the holiday. That's right, whether it was all he wanted or not for Christmas, he was getting his two lower front teeth.
We worried about how he would act while teething, but it turns out we had nothing to worry about when compared with what was to come.
Grayson was great at Christmas Eve, and during Christmas morning. In fact the morning came with the first normal bowel movement in two weeks, which was followed by much cheering and high fiving from the parents. We did stop short of actually throwing a parade in the name of good poopy diapers, but it was only after my brother became worried that we would wake the neighbors. All would not stay great when Grayson started to act a little funny during the afternoon. A little crankiness began, but that could be for any multitude of reasons for an infant.
We started to hear him cough really throaty, and started to really get worried when his breathing sounded kind of flemmy. On top of that we started to receive weather reports of the impeding doom of a winter blizzard for the following day. We (mostly me) began to act completely irrationally, and threatening to throw everyone in the car for an immediate overnight return trip to Ohio. Nicole was eventually able to calm me down and convince me to wait until the morning and see how Grayson was doing. After noticing that Grayson seemed to be doing better while hanging out at my little brothers "magical house", I agreed that maybe I was being a little rash.
Well that evening became very interesting. Grayson became increasingly worse, and Nicole and I took turns holding him for the entire night since it was the only way he would sleep. We woke up to find out that our baby now was doing his best impersonation of the core of the sun by feeling ridiculously hot to the touch. We took his temperature at 102.4.
This was followed by a fair amount of acting completely insane with some calls to parents and to our pediatrician. The call to the pediatrician came after a frantic moment of trying to boot up one dead laptop, and watching helplessly as the second laptop chose to perform a five minute check of the hard drive during boot up. Suffice it to say that I now have the pediatricians number in my cell phone, and have been thoroughly embarrassed for not having it in there in the first place. Turns out that our boy has croup, rhymes with poop, but turns out to be a bigger problem. I was instructed to take my child outside into the cold air and walk around for 10 minutes. I remembered to bundle up Grayson, but forgot to bundle myself up. I think Freud would say I was helping myself atone for the sins of letting my kid get this sick.
We then piled into the car and got the heck out of dodge in order to avoid getting caught in the blizzard which was slated to begin in a few hours. We spent a relatively uneventful 11 hour ride home in which we kept Grayson loaded with ibuprofen and sleeping with a little feeding in between. The feeding was fun because it involved Nicole working on her contortionist skills while moving from the front seat to the back seat, and then back when the feeding was done. Our plan was to get home, spend a few hours resting, and prepare to spend the evening up with a sick child. Grayson had other plans.
He started fussing for the last half hour of the ride home. Please note, he did not make a peep the entire ride up until that point. He then proceeded to be a complete nightmare for two hours before his exhausted parents put him back in the car, and drove around, again, until he fell back asleep. We got home, and ninja skilled our way to his room where we put him down to sleep without removing him from the car seat. The night was spent taking care of a child who was coughing and wheezing. This care included a few trips to the bathroom with the shower running to create steam to help the kid's breathing.
The night was long, but we eventually all got some much needed rest. Grayson has since been having fun recovering at home, and has even felt good enough to run some errands with his parents. Things are finally starting to calm down.
Basically this weekend turned out to be nothing like we planned or hoped, but one thing is for sure, we are going to have some great stories for a long time about Grayson's first Christmas.
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