Playing with Frogs

This week, Max discovered a new game and it’s been quite amusing. He has a little boat with a miniature Elmo and Ernie for deck hands, and he loves to play with it in the bath. It came with a small dingy (heh heh) and up until this week, that’s all it’s been.

Now it’s a breeding ground for small froggies.

He gets the boat filled with water, then reaches in to it. When he lifts his hands out, the thumbs of both hands are pressed against their respective forefingers. He then shouts, “Frogs!” or “Froggies!” and hands them to me. I cup them in my hand saying soothing things like, “Hello Froggie, how are you today?” Then I snap my head back hard, acting like the Froggie just punched the crap out of me. My hands flail about as the Froggie facilitates his escape from my clutches. Max and I shout for Froggie to come back, but by that point he’s halfway to Cabo. Sometimes I even catch the Froggie and hand it back to Max, who opens his mouth wide and acts like he eats it.

Good times, these. I love seeing his little imagination develop and even the smallest of games are ones My Fair Lady and I encourage. He’s past two now and his brain is running a mile a minute from the moment he wakes up. I don’t know when or if he’ll ever lose that energy, but if it happens it will be very far in the future. He’s going to look back on his childhood and smile if we have anything to say about it.

That is until he starts to think about the times he was sick, like this most recent instance. It’s been a brutal couple of weeks due to day care. He enjoys the heck out of it but being surrounded by viral carrier monkeys all day every day will test even the strongest of immune systems. This latest bug started as a head cold before gradually revealing its true nature as something far more insidious.

It sapped his energy, then filled his head with total congestion followed by a raging cough and a scorching fever. And for good measure it threw in a minor ear infection. In short, Little Man was nine kinds of screwed. I took him to the doctor and received word that we should try out a breathing machine on him to see if that worked. We also were given an antibiotic. Fast forward several days later and I’ve got it, because sharing is caring don’tcha know, and he wasn’t showing any sign of improvement. To make matters worse, his eyes started filling with junk to the point where they were sealed shut by morning. It’s great fun as a parent to wake up to a screaming child who physically can’t open their eyes.

We returned to the doctor who wisely prescribed an even stronger antibiotic along with some eye drops.

Two days later his fever broke and he started feeling much better. By Friday, he was running around the house playing with his Tootsie (my mother who graciously watched him all week). But the even better news was with the weather as awesome as it was this weekend, we were able to get out and enjoy it without hacking up our lungs. He enjoys running around the yard, especially with his play structure in the back. Whenever he slides down it he always says, “wheeee.” It’s not a shout or anything, more like a statement of fact which makes it even funnier and cuter when he does it. Which pretty much sums up most everything he does now.

Yup, I’m kinda glad we have him.