Together in the Trenches

Well, last night was no fun.

My husband is sick. Truthfully, he is genuinely sick. I'll be honest and say with all the love in the world that I believe he has a bit of The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome when it comes to illness, however. He will proclaim that he's coming down with something fairly often, only for it to never materialize.

And, when he does get sick, well, he's like most men. Sorry guys, but, as a general rule, you are big babies. I don't deal with this very well. Frankly, I don't deal with this well at all. It's all I can do to not shout in frustration for him to "suck it up" so we can get on with life. Not good. Bad, bad wife!

So, he was being a baby. I was pulling the "I-can-have-cancer-plus-food-poisoning-plus-a-gangrene-leg-and-still-take-care-of-your-children" kind of argument, and then our older son started to scream from his bedroom in pain.

I loathe bedtime pain. It escalates into a full-blown meltdown that usually prevents sleep for a good long time, which is exactly what happened. We've managed to reduce our son's crying to at most one episode a day, and, yesterday's landed at night. It was loud. It was a full-blown scream, and nothing seemed

to soothe him.

After an hour of medicating him and talking with him to no avail, I finally inched out of his room in an effort to give him space.

There it is: my familiar spot on the floor at the top of the stairs. And who should sit down next to me but my husband. No longer my fighting partner, we were parents, brainstorming on how we could help our first-born child.

We had tried all the tricks. In the end, all we could offer was our presence. So, we sat in his doorway until he settled some time around midnight when we were then free to leave the trenches for a little while.

(Doesn't my trenchmate look like he's having fun last night?)