My Purple Hayes Daze

About a week ago, Hayes came down with a fever.  That’s the freaky thing about kids; one minute they’re perfectly fine, laughing and playing and being cute.  Then the next thing you know, they’re miserable and fussy and clingy with a full-blown sickness from a bug you never saw coming.  It only proves that kids are such troopers.  It really takes a lot to get them down.

Well, Hayes’s sudden fever was followed up by a few days of coughing and a runny nose.  It turned out to be just a nasty cold.  And, of course, between the nose blowing and wiping sneeze particles off of my face, I caught the bug too–even though I attempted to medically boost my defenses.  Alas, such is the viscious cycle of the cold virus.

I knew even as I cooled Hayes’s hot body with a damp face towel that I would, more than likely, be next.  And I knew as he slept beside me moaning from discomfort that it would soon be me laying there in misery.  But the crazy/beautiful thing about being a mom is that none of that stops me from holding Hayes’s snotty tissue in my hand until I can find a trash can, or drying his tearing eye with my bare hand when a tissue cannot be found.  We moms endure all the spit-sprayed coughs and sneezes that our children have inside of them with little more than a firm reminder to “dude, cover your mouth!…please.”

Yes, we’ll do anything for the children we love and love to take care of.  Even if it makes us sick.