A Bad Egg

            I don’t know what is worse being a sick parent or being a parent with a sick kid.  Being a sick parent is pretty bad.  I have been fighting a sinus infection for over a month.  A month is a reasonable amount of time to recover from say appendicitis, but a sinus infection?  It might have something to do with the fact that since I am still breastfeeding our 7-month-old daughter, I cannot take antibiotics.  She would not die if she had to drink formula for a week, but that is not the best for her.

            This is an example of the vicious circle of parenting:  you love your children so much that you think more about their wellbeing than your own.  And as a result, you end up not at your best.

            Take what happened on Wednesday night.  After a day of inhaling salt water, drinking eucalyptus tea, sitting above a steaming pot of water and massaging my sinuses (all breastfeeding-approved but yet very time consuming remedies), my 2-year old son came home from daycare.   He needed to eat dinner.  I had to make something easy and that my son would like so that I would not have to scrape it off the dog.  I also thought that it should involve some more hot steam for my nose.

            I settled on soft-boiled eggs so that my son could happily dip pieces of buttered toast into the yolk while I got some more steam time for my nose above the cooking pot.  In my exploding sinus cavity haze, I missed the fact that the eggs possibly smelled off.  I haven’t smelled a thing for a month (very helpful when blissfully ignoring soiled diapers but not in determining the safety of eggs).  Yes, two of the eggs did float when I put them into the pot of water.  This is a red flag for bad eggs, which I know now.

            At 9:30 PM, both children were sleeping soundly, and I curled up with a book.  Our son cried from his room, and my husband went to him.  My husband then called for me (this was a bad sign), and I walked in to see the curdled remains of our son’s lunch and dinner splashed out onto his bed.  He threw up everything in his stomach.

            The following day, he got to stay home from daycare so that we could both be sick together.  It was a wonderful situation for the cleanliness of our home.  Every toy, book, shoe, dish, baby spoon and crumb just stayed where it was last used.  I was too tired to do anything beside ensure that the kids were still alive.

           Our son quickly recovered.  He only vomited one more time after the eggs and only because he ate his applesauce too fast.  I, on the other hand, I am still recovering.