Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Deadly Daycare Crud (or.. welcome to the germ of the month club!)

(Originally posted on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 by Cathy)

Once upon a time, before Dalty was even a speck on a glimmer in his daddy's eye, my organic prof at New College had a bad term, in which it seemed like he was sick more than he was healthy, with one cold after another. He described having kids in daycare/school as being a subscriber to the germ of the month club.

So I sort of knew what I was getting into, with Dalty starting daycare. What I didn't count on was that you get your first germ delivered on the first day - they don't make you wait until you've been there a month or anything. Dalton's first day at daycare went well, although he wasn't there for as long as he typically will be, since we had some issues getting out the door in the morning with the 20-thousand plastic bins stuffed with baby stuff (more on them in another post, perhaps).

(Warning, parts of this are graphic.)
Tuesday was my day to stay home with Dalton. The three of us went out to dinner. I was feeling a bit queasy when we got back, but thought maybe I'd eaten something that didn't agree with me. Dalton and I went to bed, and then the vomitting started. Apparently Dalton and I picked up the deadly daycare crud at nearly the same time, and it has a pretty consistent incubation time, since he waited a whole 10 minutes after I started puking to follow along. At first, I was trying to tell myself that it was just sympathetic, since his aunt Jes used to puke any time anyone else did, and maybe it's genetic.

Nope. We spent all of last night with me running into the bathroom for various forms of gastrointestinal distress, and Dalton, not understanding the proper use of a barf bowl, throwing up in bed. His sequence went something like "nurse, nurse, nurse, projectile vomit, whimper, fall asleep." (I was personally doing a pretty good job with the projectile vomitting and whimpering part, but less well on the falling asleep part.) So what do you do with a baby who has just thrown up all over his part of the bed, but is now blessedly asleep, especially at 3 am, with one parent with a major presentation the next day, and the other parent with 5 hours of teaching time the next day? You shrug, figure that if he's sleeping he isn't screaming, pull the covers up a little bit higher so that he doesn't get cold (since now parts of him are damp) and try to fall back asleep, mostly unsuccessfully, since the entire front of your torso is wet with baby spew.

Fortunately, we're somewhat inured to the bed smelling like sour milk.

And on that note, Tim just came downstairs to say that Dalton has thrown up again, and would I like to reload him?

No picture today (did you REALLY want one?), but I did add some to my previous posts below. Enjoy!

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