Point 4

It's been one heck of a week.

1. I got sick. I had a sore throat on Saturday, which progressed to a head cold that lasted until Friday.

Google assured me that by continuing to breastfeed, Jack would receive lots of good antibodies. Well, see point 4.

2. Jack got his two month immunizations on Tuesday. The actual shot was quite upsetting to all of us, but we survived. After nursing, he zonked out for a few hours. All seemed well. Then, at about 4pm, he started crying. And crying. And crying. And crying. He cried pretty much straight until 8pm (visions of encephalitis from the DTAP vaccine dancing through my head), at which point he was suddenly happy.

Then Wednesday came, and he had a few intervals of upsetness. Then Thursday came, and he had another rough day. This kind of behavior is very unusual for Jack -- he certainly cries, but it is usually short lived.

We thought he was having a bad reaction to the vaccine, until, well, see point 4.

3. Greg and I planned a babysitting trade-off with our friends. They would watch Jack on Saturday; we would watch Julian on Sunday.

This fell through. Uh, well, see point 4.

4. So here we are, at point 4, the news: Jack got his first cold! We didn't realize that his crying was due to the cold until his congestion kicked in late on Thursday. There was no denying it: poor fella had a very stuffy nose.

Thursday night was tough for him; I finally got up at 4am and kept him vertical to help the stuffiness. We used a bulb syringe on him with saline drops; he hated that (it left him screaming), and I'm not sure it improved his stuffiness that much. The best thing we did was to have Greg take him in the shower; the steam really cleared up his nose, and Jack loved being in the running water.

The worst of it was over Thursday night. Mostly, he's grumpy and wants to be held a lot. Assuming he caught what I had, he's had a heck of a scratchy throat. Now, personally, when I have a scratchy throat, the last thing I want to do is yell at regular intervals for hours and hours... but, y'know, we all deal with general malaise differently.

5. Speaking of which, Greg's sick, too.

In place of our much anticipated alone-date, we had a Jack-date. I made tomato and mozzarella panini and a nice big salad with avocado dressing. We put Jack in the stroller and walked the 2 miles to the St. Ronan Dog Park to have a picnic (this park is in fact Jack's namesake. It's where Greg and I met, so we decided to name him Jack Ronan). Jack slept and us two adults had a lovely time, scratchy throats and all.