Matthew's "Sick" Day

New Years Eve began with a trip to urgent care.

First, let me back up to Wednesday. Matthew came home from school with a typical winter cough. He asked to stay home from school on Thursday which Bob and I both thought was a ploy to play with all his new toys. I did not mind letting him stay home because I was planning on working from home and anyway his normal preschool schedule was on hiatus until after the New Year.  

On Thursday Matthew spent the day playing with his toys and inventing a number of places (Bat Club, Mighty Machine Town) in his fort under the kitchen table. He seemed fine all day but if you asked him how he was feeling his response would be to walk very slow and say he was still sick. It seems that sick people walk at the pace of a turtle.   

Friday was not a school day, and Matthew was no longer pretending to be sick so we accepted an invitation for him to play at a friend’s house in the afternoon. When he was dropped off at home later his friend’s mom said that her son had the same matching cough as Matthew’s. Around here a cough in the winter is as common as chapped lips. That night we went out to dinner for pizza. He went to bed as normal that night.

I was still awake reading at 11 when Matthew came running into our room crying about the dark, pirates, and wanting to be alone. This continued all night. Exactly once he told us his ear hurt but in a way that didn’t make us believe him.  By morning my eyes felt like sandpaper. Bob, Matthew, and I were sitting on the couching having the most exhausting argument ever. Something to do with pirates. Then Matthew held his hand over his ear and said it hurt. A lot. A trip to urgent care confirmed that he had an ear infection in one ear.

Nor Bob or I can recall the last time we stayed up all night on the night before New Year’s Eve. These kids of ours keep us young!