Yesterday provided a lesson in how five improves everything, even being sick. Before now, a wretched night begat an equally wretched next day, albeit wretched in a different way. Typically, Simon spends the day following a bad night whiny and miserable. We understand and cut him a lot of slack, but that doesn’t make it any less trying.
That seems to have changed. Simon awoke yesterday at about 7:30, having enjoyed less than five hours of quality sleep: two before he began throwing up, which included bouts of intense stomach pain, and three after the dry heaves finally abated. This child needs 10 to 11 hours per night, and I’m sure his stomach was a right mess after all the upheaval. In fact, he told me several times that it felt “like it [was] dancing.” Ipso facto, Saturday should have tried everyone’s patience.
It didn’t at all. When faced with the prospect of nothing but Gatorade, one teaspoon at a time, ten to fifteen minutes apart, Simon watched the clock and played along. When given only bland food and not much of it hours later, he nodded in agreement instead of being upset. And when he got tired, which happened a lot, he took himself off to bed. Well, the first wave of fatigue caught him by surprise and resulted in a 1.5 hour snooze on the couch, but for the next two he announced, “I’m tired now; I think I need to go upstairs and take a nap” and then proceeded to do just that.
Less than two hours after his third nap of the day, we had this exchange:
“Would you like some dinner? Or a bath? Or some stories? What can I do for you?”
“Maybe tomorrow. I just want to go to bed now.”
We made him hold out until 8:00 owing to fears he’d awake bright eyed and bushy tailed at 6:00. Instead he partially awoke at 6:30, then went back to sleep until a respectable 7:30. Honestly, he was a little trooper the whole day. Very cooperative with our requests, very sweet, and able to joke and play some board games when he wasn’t sleeping. The greatest emblem of this came when I walked downstairs yesterday morning and found him seated on the couch with a bucket by his feet. He smiled weakly and said:
“I’m on the couch, but it’s ok. I’ve got a bucket with me so if I need to barf, I can just lean over and barf into the bucket. I might need you or Daddy to help me hold it, but with the bucket I won’t barf on the couch. So that’s the good news.”
The better news was that he didn’t need that bucket all day and appears to be well on the road to recovery. Well, that and his being such a trooper all day.
What a great kid you have there.