Hackin' Jack

These past few days at Stately Wasser Manor have been tough. Jack woke up at the hideous hour of 4:45 in the morning on Sunday coughing so hard that he was wheezing. It was really scary; Steve thought he might be choking and I thought it might be an asthma attack. Eventually, it calmed down, but at that point there was no getting Jack back to sleep. Steve took him downstairs and told me to take the first shift of sleeping.

It's not easy to fall right back asleep after something like that, but eventually I did. Unfortunately, I think I'd just hit REM sleep when Steve woke me up and asked me to take over. I stumbled downstairs, groggy and bleary-eyed. Jack was watching Dora, and I was even more confused. Dora put Boots in charge of a party and went off with... Swiper? Swiper was helping Dora travel around the world, even preventing different countries' versions of himself from swiping friendship bracelets? Huh? And how did Swiper learn the "Come on, vamonos" song? Several cups of coffee later, I verified that I was not halucinating, but it was a bit touch and go for a while there.

I took Jack to the doctor on Monday - a walk-in clinic at his doctor's office since it was New Year's Eve, so he didn't see his usual doctor. This guy's name was Dr. Schott, which is awesome. Really if your last name is Schott, you should either be a pediatrician or open a bar. Honestly, he should do both. Dr. Schott would be an awesome name for a bar.

I told Dr. Schott about Jack's cough, and Jack, who was pretending to be Spider-Man at the moment, showed the doctor a boo-boo and claimed that it was the bite of a radioactive spider. He told Jack that he'd soon be able to crawl walls... and told me that he had Croup. Jack's treatment for the spider bite, I assume, is to remember that with great power comes great responsibility. For the croup, he prescribed a sterroid to lessen the swelling of his throat.

I went to Target to fill the prescription/see if they had any cute new clothes. Feeling like quite the responsible mom, I asked the pharmacist if there were any side effects I should be aware of. She told me that it would probably make him "jittery." Lovely. Really, every three-year-old needs something to make him especially hyper.

And the stuff definitely makes him nutty. Later that night, he was bouncing off the walls, so determined to destroy something that I gave him a catalog and asked him to rip it up so that I could get just a little bit of work done in the kitchen. Then I blasted my Jack playlist on my iPod and made him dance to burn some of that energy off. Napping is out of the question, and it's hard for him to fall asleep at night, between the coughing and the drug-induced crazy.

The good news is that he slept very well last night - from 7:30 PM to 7:00 AM. And he's only on the meds until Friday. I hope my little guy's cough gets better soon... for all our sakes.