A Couple Additions

Joe has already told the story of our ER trip and Nicholas' scarlet fever, but I wanted to throw in a few anecdotes about the event as well.

1) For once I was sad to be proven right. This mother's intuition thing is really nothing to sneeze at. I think I'm going to have to take it more seriously from now on. I just knew something was seriously wrong when I was trying to get Nicholas to bed, but fought to get him to sleep anyway. I was really tempted to call Joe home from choir or call the doctor, but there was nothing identifiably wrong to point to. Nicholas had no fever, he said nothing hurt, he looked perfectly normal. But something was wrong--he wasn't himself. And so I insisted on turning the monitor up last night because I was anxious. I feel guilty about forcing Nicholas to go to bed and going to sleep ourselves, but there really was nothing identifiable wrong.

2) The drive to the ER was the scariest 5 minutes of my life. Or, more accurately, the first 3 minutes of the drive were the scariest of my life. Nicholas' breathing seemed to instantly calm when we walked outside, which was good except that then it almost didn't sound like he was breathing. And for the first 3 minutes of the drive he was completely zoned out, with blank eyes and not responding to my questions. I was really afraid he was about to lose consciousness or something. But then something snapped in (right after Joe ran a red light--coincidence, maybe) and he suddenly started talking to us, commenting on the Sesame Street songs that were playing. I have never been so relieved!

3) Nicholas has never had a safety object (unless you count his thumb), but last night he apparently decided he needed one and grasped onto his sippy cup as an appropriate object to cling to. Absurd? Yes. But highly adorable. We couldn't help laughing at him as he slept snuggled into me in the hospital bed, his face covered in a combination of dried snot, dried tear lines, and medicine, gripping tightly onto the dinosaur sippy cup.

Overall, Nicholas proved yet again that he is quite the trooper. He only lost it a couple times in the course of all of the insanity and medicines and what not, and even at the very end of the long night we were able to strike a deal with him--he lie still to get a temperature taken and then swallow all of the last dose of medicine and we could go home. His response? "Deal." And then complete cooperation. Seriously, I don't know many adults (myself included) who handle illnesses so well.