Poor poor pitiful me

I have high hopes for this week. That's mainly because I can't see any way that it could be worse than last week. I have not had a single night of uninterrupted sleep since last Sunday. But at least now we know what's going on: both boys have ear infections.

Firstborn had been waking me up by coughing - loudly - at about two in the morning, until I went and medicated him. Last Thursday, he changed the tune: he woke me up at the same time, but instead of coughing, he was crying. When I asked him why, he said, "My ear hurts. Inside!"

Sure enough, the pediatrician says he has a raging ear infection.

Friday night, Secondborn was running a bit of a fever. He'd been... discombobulated, clumsy and clingy, for the last couple of days. (It seems to funny to talk about a toddler being "clumsy" since, y'know, toddler, but in fact the difference is really obvious if you're used to him just cruising around and climbing things.)

Then, on Saturday night, the fever spiked up to 105, and I ended up sitting with him in a rather chilly bathtub to bring his temperature down before my wife hustled him off the emergency room. This would have been... I don't know, four-thirty in the morning.

I should note, by the way, that we actually own one of those little devices that is supposed to help you tell if someone has an ear infection. Apparently it bounces a bit of hypersonic sound off the eardrum, and uses the echo to tell how much fluid has built up behind it. Or at least, that's the way it works for adults. For the boys, it consistently indicated that their ears were fine. Apparently the test works differently for children; for children, if you can stick the thing in their ears in the first place, they probably don't have ear infections.

Anyway, both boys are now on antibiotics. Secondborn is also on regular doses of painkiller - "regular" in this context means "alternating between acetaminophin and ibuprofen every three hours" - which means that somebody has to give him his meds at odd hours of the night. "Somebody" in this context means "me". So I'm sitting in the living room at ten o'clock (which feels a lot more like midnight), and I'm thinking, That's okay, I'll just write a little bit, and then I'll give him his one a.m. meds, and then I'll go to bed myself.

And then I fired up the laptop, opened the word processor, and realized that there was absolutely no way that I was going to be able to add anything worthwhile to any of my current projects. As a matter of fact, I probably wasn't too far from typing page after page of ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. So I set my alarm and went to sleep, got up and medicated the baby, and went back to sleep.

And then, when I got up this morning, I actually remembered to give Firstborn his morning dose of antibiotics before I took him over to his Nana's house.

I'm calling that a win.

So when I mention that becoming a parent is a huge investment of your time, energy, and money... well, weeks like that are Exhibit A. (On the upside, last night - when everyone was medicated and feeling better - my wife came in to find me on the living room floor, where both boys had piled on to tickle me. So, as I've also mentioned before, there are rewards to parenting too.)

Anyway, that's why I didn't get anything written this weekend. I've got a couple of random posts started, but they need to be finished and proofed. I was hoping that the Deranged Cultist would stop by and pick up the slack, but either the Whisperers got him or he's enjoying his "vacation" too much. Hopefully the latter.

Busy as the next few weeks are going to be, I probably will be keeping up with the blog (if only erratically). It's a good way to blow off steam, and it doesn't take the sort of time commitment that longer writing projects require. If I can just get enough sleep, I might even have coherent things to say; otherwise, I'll try to babble in an entertaining fashion.

How's everyone else doing?