Sick Munchkin

After spending all of about five minutes in perfect health and wellness following her recent cold, the lovely Jayna developed croup last night, which meant I had to take another sick day to care for her while Wonder Woman was at work. Awesome.

I took her to the doc around midday, and because of her cough, I was instructed to bring her in not through the front entrance, but through the back entrance, at which point I was to use the courtesy phone to call the reception desk and notify them that we were waiting in the quarantined airlock area, doing our best not to infect the masses.

I did as I was told, and after about 10 minutes of waiting in purgatory, a nurse wearing a face mask came to retrieve us and tried to get Jayna to put on a face mask, as well. Jayna responded by saying, “Not on your life, bitch!” At least, that’s what she might as well have said, so the clearly annoyed Nurse Huffypants allowed the 39-pound peanut to break protocol and head into the doc’s office unmasked. Four years old and already a total rebel.

Eventually, our pediatrician came in to check her out, and not once during the entire exam did she cough, which prompted me to ask the doc if he could just hang out with us all day, since apparently his presence is a natural cough suppressant. He wasn’t up for that, so he instead sent in a nurse with a small dose of strawberry-flavored syrup that contained a steroid designed to reduce the croup-induced inflammation of her vocal cords and adjacent areas. Jayna responded to the presentation of this elixir with a hardy “Not on your life, bitch!” At least, that’s what she might as well have said, so the clearly annoyed Nurse Huffypants II acquiesced when I asked her to leave us so that I could coax Jayna into taking it, which I eventually did … sort of.

I say “sort of” because she somehow pulled off a magic trick whereby she drank the medicine, and then drank a little shot of water that I placed in the medicine cup, and then I turned my head for a moment, and when I turned back, there was a big drop of bright red strawberry syrup clinging to her bottom lip, and a massive drizzle of the stuff staining the front of her shirt (visible adjacent to her right upper arm). I have no idea how she accomplished this.

Ironically, the ordeal of getting her to take the medicine resulted in much crying and coughing, which seemed rather counter-intuitive.

Once I had mopped her up and calmed her down, we headed over to the nearby Dunkin Donuts, because I like to make sure the kids eat healthy when they’re sick. She wolfed down three glazed Munchkins and drank a whopping two or three sips of orange juice, and that was just fine with me, because, with the yucky taste of the medicine defeated and her tummy now relatively full, the only thing left for her to do was fall asleep during the ride home … which, thankfully, she did.

Wonder Woman returned from work a short while later, and I have since spent many hours setting up the new MacBook Pro and monitor that my employer sent to replace my deceased iMac.

Point being: that awesome blog entry I was planning to write today? Yeah, that didn’t happen. Instead, you get a sleep-deprived me describing yet another challenging day in suburbia. And with that, I bid you good night.