(Un)Happy Halloween

My sweet middle child is sick.  Really sick.  It started yesterday with a dry cough but I wrote it off as an anomaly.  Last night things took a turn for the worse.  As always happens when he gets sick, his breathing became labored and the cough increased.  In the early morning hours the hubby got up with him to give him a breathing treatment.  I still had high hopes that when he awoke he’d feel better and be able to attend his preschool Halloween party.

Well, we got up this morning and got ready for school.  All were dressed in there Halloween best and eating breakfast when my middle man (I’ll call him MMM or MM from here on out) started to complain of a belly ache.  Then he started to cry.  With MMM that is the tell-tale sign of impending up-chuck.  I ran for a “barf bowl” (as we call them) and shortly after he emptied his almost-empty belly into the receptacle.

I was dreading telling him that he couldn’t go to class today.  I imagined tears and whining and, well, devastation.  Instead the conversation went like this:

Me:  “Hey, buddy.  You’re sick, sweetie, so you can’t go to school today.

MMM: (sad face)

Me:  “You don’t want your friends to get sick too, right?”

MMM: (tears welling up) “No.”

Me: “Do you want to snuggle and watch movies instead?”

MMM: “Yeah!”

And that was that.  No more tears and not an ounce of disappointment.

So we watched a movie then MM took a three hour nap!  Poor thing.  (He must have slept even worse then I thought he had.)

I often forget how resilient MMM is.  While my boy is often incredibly sensitive he can also “roll with the punches” in a way us adults can find hard to do.  And MMM is pretty great at finding the bright side of whatever comes his way.

So, we’ll make the best of our rainy Halloween day with snuggles and scented candles.  We’ll carve our pumpkins when oldest gets home from school and sweet oldest son already promised to share his loot with MMM.  Our world will keep on rolling and life is still good, even if it didn’t go just as we’d hoped.

Happy Halloween from my family to yours.