Sick Kid

Last week was miserable all the way around.

Olivia came down with a cold on Sunday. She was sniffly, achy, and whiny; basically, she was miserable and wanted to make sure we all knew it.

The first night, she was achy and so sleep didn’t come easily. She whimpered most of the night, often asking, “Why am I so achy? How can my throat hurt when I don’t even have any tonsils? It even hurts when I yawn.”

At that point, it was around 2:30am, so I gently told her, “If you’d go to sleep, you wouldn’t be yawning and then you wouldn’t be hurting.”

She stayed home from school on Monday but seemed to be on the mend so we sent her to school on Tuesday. When I got home from work, she looked pale and tired but a little better. But her nose was still full of thick green snot. Her right nostril and the area around her nose was red from being rubbed all day long.

And let me ask right here, how does one teach a child to blow their nose? If nose-blowing doesn’t come naturally, how do you teach it? Nothing has ever come naturally to Olivia. But I know that once she learns to blow her nose, she won’t ever forget. However, this particular cold did not lend itself to the learning of blowing her nose.

Nope, instead, she went through a box of tissues a day, wiping that disgusting green snot on a corner of a tissue and then throwing it away and yanking a new tissue out of the box.

I even went out and bought her fancy tissues with LOTION hoping they would be kinder to her nose and the cheek area surrounding said nose.

As of yesterday morning, her face looks better. The redness has healed a bit and she’s on the mend.

I will confess to having given her Benadryl last night and the night before last. Not only was I hoping it would dry her up, she and I both needed the sleep that might come from it.

All this to say that I’m tired. So, so tired. Alyssa said to me one day last week, “Did you know that sleep deprivation is a form of torture?”

I turned slowly toward her and said, “You don’t say?”

By the time she said this it had been at least three nights during which Olivia woke me up at least four times, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. She needed new tissues, or she needed a washcloth to clean the dried snot. Sometimes she wanted a drink of water or she needed to me replace the water in the bottle I’d given her just the hour before with COLD water, thank you very much because this water has been out of the fridge for an hour and isn’t cold ENOUGH. Sometimes, she just wanted company because, hey, she was awake and could I just be awake with her? Hi.

I know we went through about eight years of these kinds of nights but the past two years having been lovely, what with the sleeping through the night five out of seven nights. So five nights in a row of NOT sleeping through the night was torture for me.

So yeah, not apologizing for the Benadryl. Not even a little. Saturday night she only woke me up once. Last night? Not at all.

I’m hopeful that we’re all on the mend at this point.