At the end of last week my wife and I were congratulating ourselves for missing a Hand, Foot and Mouth outbreak at our daycare. But, by Saturday morning it was clear something was off about the kiddo and a rocky weekend was underway. By Saturday afternoon, blisters were visible. By Sunday he had broken out and he had a fever.
Luckily he kept eating, drinking enough to not get dehydrated and children’s Tylenol and Motrin do their thing fairly well. Sleep came hard from the irritation of the rash and an incessant fusillade of neighborhood fireworks, with near professional grade barrages lasting for hours, going past midnight. After hours of trying to console him in his room, we brought him into our bed and we all slept, some.
Today we measured no fever, but the blisters continued to break out and cause havoc. Sleep still did not come easy.
It’s been an exhausting weekend with no bandwidth for catching-up on anything, let alone for relaxing.
This—these few words—are the extent of the “breaks.” I hear him awake again and crying despite being exhausted himself.
I understand this is not an exceptional hardship in the panoply of parenting challenges. It is merely another first for me, and it is wrapped in skating on the edge of burnout, and limited ability to get the kind of childcare help we’d normally have the privilege to tap because of the pandemic and other circumstances. So, I’m just kvetching.
