As if our week hadn’t been interesting enough, Hot Wheels decided to throw us a curve on Friday morning. He came out to the kitchen in the morning with a quirky look on his face and told us he “didn’t like swallowing so much.” That led to not wanting to eat breakfast, and shortly thereafter, the announcement that he was not going to school that day. Why not? “I’m just not right.”
At first I thought – Baloney! He has no symptoms: no fever, runny nose, cough. Does not liking to swallow qualify you for a day off? What sort of precedent would we be setting? But then I watched him, and felt he wasn’t trying to get out of anything. He really just wasn’t right, as he explained. We let him stay home. (I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some doubts about whether or not we were getting played.)
By about 11 am, however, we had the evidence – 101.5 fever, stomach pain, red spots across his throat. By 1:30 pm we had the diagnosis – strep. By 5 pm he had relief – one dose of the antibiotic down, and he was already feeling like himself again. Now we just have to keep up the twice daily song and dance to get him to down the amoxicillin that tastes so horrid. Other than that, he’s completely repaired. We try not to use antibiotics unless we have to, and when we do, I’m profoundly grateful for them.
When we were in the pre-miracle drug portion of our Friday, we played board games and read and he moaned a bit. And we watched Nike commercials on YouTube. Recently I came across this one over on SwissMiss, and I’ve been addicted to it ever since:
I would have loved to be in the meeting when the creative team presented the idea of city-wide tag. Absolutely fantastic.
We watched another Nike ad for the Men vs. Women running challenge from the beginning of the year, and Hot Wheels is absolutely stuck on it. He describes it in detail to people and we showed it to our friends Amy and Andy when they were over this evening – afterwards he sighed and said, “I love that movie!” When Amy asked him what he liked about it, he replied, “I don’t know; it just makes me feel good in my body.” I’m thinking it might account for the 20 laps he felt compelled to run around our house this afternoon. The competition’s over, dude!