Moms & Dads Don't Get Sick

Moms and Dads don't get sick. Or at least they don't get sick days. I don't remember my parents ever even having a cold until I was in high school. In retrospect there is no way that is possible, but either they must have hid it like champs or I was totally oblivious. Probably the latter. Ian and I had our first experience at being 'sick' with Evan this past week.  Sick is not in quotation marks because our maladies were minor, but because we did not get to act sick.

Prior to Evan, being sick meant maybe taking a day off work, and definitely snoozing as much as possible when home and trying to treat ourselves well by taking all the homeopathic remedies we could think of. Not so much this time.  It all started with me coming down with mastitis, a common infection for new moms.  I should have picked up on it sooner, but I thought the backache and tiredness was from carrying around my 10 pound companion all the time.  Then I woke up with a 102 fever, chills and dizziness.  So, I called into my doc and got set up to take some antibiotics.  Pre-baby, I would have then grabbed some green tea and vitamin c and plopped back into bed to wait until my prescription was ready.  This morning, however, I had this cute face cooing at me, asking for morning playtime:

Super smiles!

Pretty hard to resist.  Given that Ian had stayed up half the night before trying to get Evan to sleep and had to work that day, a tag team morning was not going to happen.  I wrapped myself up in a blanket and put the baby jungle gym next to me on the couch and tried not to hold Evan when a dizzy spell hit.

Playtime!!

After an hour or so Evan happily took a nap while I scrounged up some oj - the closest thing to a homeopathic remedy that I could find that morning.  A few minutes later, Evan was ready to eat again (right as I was finally going to lay down for a nap) and so we did feed time.  Rinse, wash and repeat. The day continued surprisingly similarly to all the other days when I was not sick.  The only major difference was that I had a big ratty blanket wrapped around me. Ian stepped up his game when he got back from CU (with the antibiotics in tow), and we stumbled through the next day. Then tragedy hit.  Ian started with a scratchy throat, which quickly became nonstop sneezing.  We tried to delude ourselves that it was just allergies, but we had to concede it was a cold when we looked up the active allergen count in Denver and there was literally nothing registered.  Both of us were down for the count, and Ian's cold was something that Evan could catch.

It was a tough few days, but we made it.  Evan was smiley and sweet the whole time so maybe he didn't even notice a difference. The best thing was that Evan didn't catch Ian's cold.  In fact, that is probably the biggest change of all - the most important thing during the whole ordeal was to make sure that Evan was ok and not getting sick. Just like everyone told us, the focus has completely shifted from 'me' or 'us' to him. While I miss the downtime that I used to afford myself, especially when sick, it's totally worth it. I guess we are ready to join the troops of Moms and Dads who no longer get sick.

Our sweet guy putting up with us being sick.