Sick Child and Paranoid Parents

My husband Jonas and I have learned quite a few things about little kids over the past couple of years, one of which is what to expect when they are ill.  So, it has come to be that we are now completely and utterly terrified of a child that has the potential of expelling the contents of her stomach.  And even more so when said child is securely buckled into a car seat.  Note: Car seat companies make it incredibly difficult to take the fabric off the seat to wash it and if you do succeed then plan to spend an entire weekend putting the stupid thing back together.

So, when Sophie developed a fever on Sunday night after a day of fun with family we were concerned about making that hour and a half trip home from Grandma’s house.  Sophie fell asleep early on and I comfortably settled into a daze watching other cars whiz by, but the moment she started coughing I frantically grabbed for the grocery bag that was caught under my seat.  The 30 seconds it took me to untangle the bag felt like an eternity as Sophie’s hacking got worse and Jonas started breaking into a sweat in anticipation of the potential bio-hazard scene that would soon be our car.  I shoved the bag towards Sophie just in time for her to stop coughing and fall back to sleep, false alarm. 

The rest of the car ride home I sat twisted in my seat staring at Sophie as if she were a geyser about to erupt, with a death grip on the bag.  Every time I heard so much as a throat clearing I would thrust the bag towards her as fast as I could and she would open her eyes look at the bag and me in confusion and doze back to sleep.  Luckily we made it home without incident.

The last couple of days at home Sophie has still been coughing and of course I have made attempts to limit the impact of any stomach emptying that might occur in my house.  During one incident I frantically disassembled my Tupperware shelf, grabbing the largest container I could find and in a stunt worthy of MLB praise skidded across the kitchen floor towards my coughing child.  Sophie stopped coughing immediately and with the biggest smile on her face said, “What’s Mommy doing?”  As I fought to try and explain my actions we both broke out into hysterical laughter at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.  Although I’m pretty sure Sophie was laughing at me not my actions.

And today, during a particularly bad coughing fit, I desperately grabbed for whatever was close by, which happened to be a donation box full of baby stuff; I swung the box in the air quickly divesting it of its contents and effectively scattering it across my living room, shoved the box at Sophie just in time for… a snort-laugh.  Yup, she is in fact her mother’s daughter, she snort-laughed at me.

All this effort I’ve put in to preventing a disastrous afternoon of cleanup and Sophie has not gotten sick once.  In fact I’m pretty sure she just has a common cold.  But really if you’d seen the damage that one tiny little person can do when she’s sick you’d be paranoid too.