The Good and the Bad

First, the good news:

The Packers won the Super Bowl! The Packers won the Super Bowl! The Packers won the Super Bowl! The smallest town with a professional sports team in the US has defeated the mighty Big City! The Lombardi Trophy is back in Title Town! Cheeseheads rule the earth!!!

Now, the bad news:

Our house has been hit with the plague. I mentioned that LL was feeling a bit sluggish and under the weather on Friday? He continued to spend 100% of his time with his feverish little body draped over me all day Saturday. And all day Sunday. After breaking out the animated movies Friday and Saturday, we switched to football on Sunday. This was absolutely a one-time-only, just-because-LL-was-sick sort of thing (definitely not something that I would have done under normal conditions, even with my Packers in the Super Bowl) but we watched eight hours of pre-game shows on Sunday. Eight hours! Do you know what people have to resort to in order to fill eight hours of pre-game? Let's interview every player on both teams, even people you've never heard of. Let's interview people who used to play for both teams but don't anymore. Let's interview people who have ever played in a Super Bowl. Let's discuss exactly how much of a jerk Ben Roethlisberger is, and whether anyone cares. Did you know that it's really cold in Dallas? Let's talk about that for a while. Here's the history of the cheesehead. Here's the history of the terrible towel. Did you know that the Packers coach grew up in Pittsburgh? Let's find out which team his former neighbors are cheering for! Did you know that Michael Douglas is cheering for Pittsburgh? Did you know that Catherine Zeta Jones is a huge Green Bay fan, because she really likes cheese? Did you know that John Madden, George W. Bush, and Cameron Diaz sat together at the Super Bowl? Does anyone who is not literally being held down against their will by a toddler actually care about all of this??? And then, when all eight hours of pre-game were over, we still had a full Super Bowl to watch. With commercials. All told, we watched 12 hours of football on Sunday. I am now officially footballed out.

Normally for LL, watching NFL games is a full-body sport. He runs when the players run. He falls down when they're tackled. He does all the referee hand motions. He yells, "Touchdown!" and "First down!" and "Go Pack!" But for this Super Bowl, he sat quietly on the couch with his head buried in a pillow. When the Packers scored a touchdown, we got a faint smile, but he didn't even have the energy to lift his arms for the signal. I convinced him to eat an Oreo cookie, and it was the only food he'd eaten since Friday. Really pathetic.

Also, by Sunday morning, both Kermit and I also had coughs, congestion, and slight fevers, so nobody was having very much fun. S was still healthy, so he was hiding out as far away from the rest of us as he could manage.

When nobody was any better Monday morning, we went to the pediatrician with both kids. Kermit has a run-of-the-mill cold. Except that he's barely one month old, and no cold is run-of-the-mill at that age. We're keeping a close eye on him.

LL's cold has progressed to pneumonia. And an ear infection. He's on antibiotics. We're trying to convince him that he needs both food and oxygen to survive, but he's not getting very much of either one right now.

I was told to provide LL with whatever he needs most (to sit in my lap, 24 hours a day) and to provide Kermit with whatever he needs most (to nurse every hour, 24 hours a day) and to be sure to get plenty of sleep so that I recover, too. Anybody notice how completely incompatible those things are?

And the kicker: the pediatrician suspected that this might not actually be a run-of-the-mill cold at all. She thought that it might be whooping cough. (Yes, LL and I are both vaccinated against it, but this particular vaccine is notoriously unreliable, so it was a very real possibility.) We were in panic mode until this morning, when we got the lab results that came up negative (thankfully). But if nobody's better by next week, our pediatrician wants to re-run the test, because it apparently has a high false negative rate.

But hey, at least the Packers won, right?