And then, a day later...

He threw up all over me. At about 9:30 p.m. Monday night Finny woke up crying and it wasn't over a lost paci. This time it was because for the first time in fourteen months Finny was sick.

Up until this point, Finny has had a couple runny and stuffy noses, but this is the first time he has had such a bellyache that he was left shaking and curled up on my chest in feverish suffering.

This was also the first time we've taken his temperature and it rose above 100 degrees. I held Finny while David called Urgent Care. They told him that there was an intestinal virus going around and we should give him Pedialyte.

"Really?" I asked. "What else did they say? I'll call."

I called back. They told me that there was an intestinal virus giong around and we should give him Pedialyte.

But they also told me he was likely to be throwing up all night and likely to have diarrhea and she said it was highly contagious and we would probably all get it.

I'm glad this turned out to be the worst case scenario. After we gave him a dose of Tylenol for his fever and David rocked him for a good hour, he fell back to sleep.

That night he was awake and crying from 2-4 despite multiple attempts to comfort him back to sleep, including one stint in the guest bed where he rolled over and bonked his head on the nightstand. Mom of the Year here.

The next day he was shackled to me. If I tried to put him down, he would wrap his arms around my neck and lock his legs around my middle. He ate breakfast and lunch on my lap, collecting bread crumbs in his hair as I tried to eat my lunch while holding him and my plate, so that he would not sporadically hurl it across the room. If I did manage to distract him for a second,-- "Hey, Finny! Look! Over there! A tupperware lid!"--then I would bolt for the kitchen to attempt to put a dish away. Within a matter of seconds he was on to me. Pound. Pound. Pound. And there he was on my pant leg, pleading.

By the end of the day, I was drained and sick to death of Sesame Street. Why? Why must Baby Bear speak with that crazy lisp? Those plastic rings? Really not much you can do with them. Stack. Unstack. Stack. That's all I got.

The twisted thing is, in a weird way, I loved it. The clinging. I loved it. Someday I'll have to sit in the car when he goes trick-or-treating with his friends. Yesterday, I hated that he felt so bad, but I loved that I was the one he wanted to make him feel better. Just me. Mommy.