love in the time of croup

I am head over heels in love with this picture. It’s mostly out of focus and I’m not sure what caused the apparent background haze, but I El Oh Vee Eeh love it. It is the very essence of last week.I’m pretty sure you could search for the term “poor baby” on here and you would get 87 quadrillion hits from last weeks posts, but I’d like to add one more for good measure. My poor baby was sicker than sick last week. First he was stuffed up, then there was the crazy loud cough for such a little man, add on a fever that made him lethargic, and finally the week climaxed with a barf-all-over-Mommy event that ended with being diagnosed with TWO infected ears (not three, but almost).OBaby was a mess, a stuffy, hacky, fevery, vomity mess, and all he wanted to do was cuddle. (As DanO said, “He’s got a fever, and the only prescription is more cuddles.”) I wore him around more than 2/3 of his waking hours (and most of his sleeping ones as well) for Monday through Thursday.It was pure joy.I mean, not in the sense that he was sick, my poor baby, but in the sense that all he wanted was Mama. So badly he wanted Mama, and my heart. O, my heart! A few times I put him on in the Moby wrap, grabbed my book, and rocked in the chair in his room as he napped. It was another one of those moments that I wish I could bottle up for later.The way his head flopped onto my chest and was so happy to stay there. The copious amounts of kisses that I planted right on that sweet head of his because it was there in front of me, asking to be kissed. When he would pop up to look around but was happy to stay right there with me (instead of being his normal, squirmy self).So yesterday, as OBaby was up, crawling his way around the house at an alarming rate, I mourned a little. For a week he was happiest to do nothing but hear my heartbeat with his ear on my chest. It was kind of like old times.Now, though? Now he has discovered the corner of the dining room where we keep the dog’s bowls and last week is just a memory.