Stuck at Home

We've been stuck at home the last few days. J and I were in the grocery store on Tuesday and he was complaining of being chilly in the meat aisle. It was a little cold, but not worth complaining about. He also didn't want his free muffin that was being offered in the bakery section. I knew something was up.

He didn't want any lunch when we got home-not even anything to drink. It wasn't as if I put out his lunch and he didn't eat it; he didn't even want me to make it. In a matter of ten minutes or so, he was just sitting on the couch like one of the other pillows. He was tired and he felt warm. He had a fever of about 100.5, which isn't too alarming, so I gave him some Tylenol and put him to bed. When he woke up, he still didn't want anything to drink, so I asked him if his throat hurt. Sure enough, he said yes. I took a look as best I could in there and noticed a bunch of red spots, so I called the doctor to see if we could get in that day. J had strep throat last year and I didn't want to take any chances.

Turns out he has one of those coxsackievirus infections, which sounds much nastier than it is. Basically you get sores in your throat (you can also get them on your hands and feet, but he doesn't have that strain.) Everybody gets one form or another of these in early childhood. A fever can last a few days and then the sores go away. It is very contagious in the meantime. Unfortunately, it's contagious for 5-7 days, so there will be no socializing until at least Saturday afternoon. That's the toughest part for both of us. After sleeping for 14 hours on Tuesday night, he woke up happy and placed his breakfast order for bacon, eggs, and cantaloupe. I'd say he's on the mend even if he needs to be quarantined from society for a bit longer.

Before J was sick, we had a nice 4th. There was a little festival in one of our neighborhood parks complete with a train, petting zoo (including a camel), face painting, hair color spraying, and lots of watermelon. The only thing that seemed a little bass-ackwards to me was that the fire department came and raised the cherry picker and sprayed the hose in one of the fields to let the kids get wet. Hello? We are in a drought down here, so that just seemed dumb. The only way I can let this go is that they also wanted the grass to be wet in case any fireworks happened to hit it later on, but that's a stretch because nothing stays wet in 100 degrees for very long.

After a quick BBQ in the early evening, we headed up to one of the county parks for a fireworks show. We were hemming and hawing as to whether we wanted to go or not, but we decided, why not? The show was great. It was so funny to watch J's expressions. He kept saying, "That's enough. I'm all done" after the first few shots, and then he laid down on B for a bit. His head kept popping up to survey the scene to see what other people were doing. Once he realized that he wasn't going to get hurt, he popped up and clapped and cheered with everybody else. The only thing that stunk was that it took over an hour to get out of the park (bad parking choice on our part and an accident on the main road attributed to this). So our child fell asleep in the car at (gasp) 10:45. Of course he didn't sleep any later than normal the next morning, but he was in a good mood, so we couldn't say that it was a waste.

Look out Miss America! Check out that wagon posture and wave

What you can't see is how hard he is pulling B's hair

He retreated to this position for a bit, but was soon up again.

That's about it from here. We're just hanging around doing indoor things like making bird feeders and painting and sneaking outside a bit here and there when it doesn't feel too hot. Oh! And I've picked about 8 Roma tomatoes a day for the last week or so. That's been pretty exciting!