Being Sick Is Stupid

If I ever meet the person who invented kids being sick in a dark alley, I will proceed to kick him or her in the fork. I swear it. With malice aforethought.

For what seems like an eternity, our kids have been sick. The progression of said sickness has been like the tides through this time (and it's dating back to around Thanksgiving now). It will start to taper off for one of them, then the other, then, without warning, a flood of snot and sneezed spit will wash over all of us again and both of them will be worse off than they were before. And we've been completely unable to decide what is causing it.

Towards the end of last week, Gabe started running nighttime fevers. He was miserable and complaining, in his own incomplete and often incomprehensible way, of a sore back and neck. Fever plus sore muscles, we thought, equals flu. Since he had a flu shot a few months back, we began to fear H1N1. But his fever never got that bad and, really, besides some consistent congestion he's not been all that bad off since those first few days of terrible sleep at night. I'm still hopeful that it WAS swine flu, just because that would mean we've all been exposed and, hopefully, won't have any more trouble with it, but that's probably just wishful thinking.

But then he started chewing on just about anything he could put in his mouth, so now we're thinking that he's getting one of his last molars in. And since he's always had a bit of fever and other cold-like symptoms when he's gotten teeth, we wonder if that wasn't the problem.

And then we noticed that Button has some white spots starting to break in on her top row--FOUR of them! All at the same time. I swear I've seen these spots come and go over the past month, though, so who knows if she'll actually get them in. I hope so because she's been so stuffed up that she sounds like a little snorting pig when she's lying in her bed, and I'd hate for her to have to go through all of this again in a few weeks when the teeth actually decide to push through.

And of course they are both irritable and cranky because of the broken nights of sleep and poor naps interrupted by coughs and big balls of phlegm snaking down their throats and out their noses. So that's fun.

Despite his crankiness this morning, Gabe invented a new game with my office chair.

Typically, the best goes he had were before we got the camera running. But he had a grand old time getting the chair spinning then putting his head in the way of it so the back or the arms would bonk him. I'm not sure whether I should be worried or not about the way he abuses his head--and his body in general, really. Somehow I suspect that I'm raising the next Super Dave Osborne.