Father's Day, Sick Day

We were supposed to head up to New Hamshire over Father's Day weekend, but Lily got sick. She threw up in the morning, then slept a lot. The original plan had been to take Jen up to work, then return in her car to pick her up and head directly to New Hampshire from there. Lily's sickness called that into question, and we figured we'd make the call during the day. If she improved, we'd go. If she didn't, we wouldn't.

She slept all day and during a brief period when she was awake, I asked her if she thought we should cancel, and she said yes. So I made the decision, and I put her in the car and we drove over to pick up Jen.

I suppose it's just as well that we decided that we weren't going, because Jen's brakes failed when I was driving, suddenly and almost completely. We later learned that the brake line had broken and all the fluid had leaked out.

I don't know why Jen's car hates me so. It broke down the last time I drove it too. But Jen's the one who keeps getting in car accidents. (Though in her defense, she's always the one getting hit.) The car should hate her!

Lily is a very good patient on the rare occasion she gets sick. Aside from her burn about a year ago, she hasn't had any major injuries or illnesses. She listens, she mostly sleeps, she drinks the broth and fluids that I bring her, and she does her best to get well.

A few days after Lily recovered, Jen and I started coming down with the same thing. I woke up feeling queasy, and thought a big breakfast would settle my tummy, but I took a very rapid turn for the worse over the course of about fifteen minutes.

And this is an example of how we reap what we sow, because Lily was so kind and took such good care of me when I was sick. She said, "I want to take care of you as you did of me when I was sick."

Jen and I each got it worse than Lily, but we recovered from the high fever and I went to a family gathering on Thursday. I commented to Jen the next day that I must be leading a more sedentary lifestyle than I thought since I began working out of a home office, because my feet were killing me after just one long day.

To add to our misery, Jen also caught a nasty case of poison ivy despite having been a naturalist for almost twenty years. By the time the weekend rolled around, the blisters on my feet had transmogrified into some blotchy rash. Jen's poison ivy had also spread to her feet and we were beginning to suspect that our initial diagnosis was in error. So we returned to the Google. Jen started typing in "rash hands" and the auto-fill prompt suggested completing the query with "and feet only."

It was the dreaded head, shoulders, knees and toes disease. It usually afflicts preschoolers, and what we think must have happened is that Lily was already infected when she left school on Wednesday and it was incubating. This is supported by the fact that we learned that one her classmates went home and infected her family.

Father's Day was nice. It was the intermediate period when Lily was feeling better and Jen and I were not yet sic. I woke up early and sat down at the computer and Lily said, "You look really tired, daddy. Why don't you go back to bad and get some more sleep?"

So I did, and got a Father's Day breakfast in bed and it was nice. Lily always has a little kid's excitement when she thinks she's pulling one over on a grown up in service of a good cause.

We watched the Karate Kid on Sunday. It's a fun 80s movie. I think the thing that struck me that while a lot of the people in the movie are good looking (it was a Hollywood picture, after all) , they're not generically, homogeneously attractive like teenagers in 2012 era films. The other thing that struck me is that Elizabeth Shue has thicker arms than Ralph Macchio. Also, if you watch the closing credits, you see that Karate Kid from the Legion of Super-Heroes is used with permission of DC comics.

Speaking of Karate, Lily wanted to know how to throw a punch after seeing the Karate Kid, so I taught her some basics about how to stand and how to make a fist. I don't want her to hit other kids, but I don't want her breaking her thumb by putting it inside the fist if she does. We're hoping to get her involved in some kind of extracurricular activity and I would be very supportive of martial arts if that's the route she wants to go. One of her friends is already taking a class, so we'll have to call the school and see if they allow prospective students to sit in on a class before enrolling.