I heart ibuprofen (or Middle-of-the-Night Musings)

So Matthew has come down with croup--again. Nevermind that croup is generally supposed to be an October to March problem, when it would actually be possible to take said croupy child out into the "cool night air" during an attack. Know what? August in WNY doesn't have particularly cool night air. Not cool enough to break stridor anyway. So there I was at 1am, running the shower on full hot (mmm, warm and steamy, just like August), my hair absorbing all that great humidity and expanding to epic proportions, try to calm my poor barky baby so that his crying wouldn't make matters worse. There's something very fundamentally MOM about being up with a sick child at 1am. Not that it's my favorite thing to be sitting in a steamy bathroom with a weepy, barking child in the middle of the night, but even if you wouldn't have chosen it, it's somehow validating when you go through it...not unlike giving birth with no drugs (RIGHT, Jill and Andrea?).

In any case, 1½ teaspoons of ibuprofen later, the hot water had run out and he was lying in our bed with us. The fever was down, the bark had quieted, and Matthew informed me that "I'm not really tired anymore," and decided to have a chat about...I have no idea what. My sleep-craving brain did not absorb the topic of his conversation(s). I only remember my efforts to doze off being punctuated by "Did you knoooooow?" And my mumbled responses of "Hmmm, oh really?" and once, from the other side of the bed, a drowsy "I did not know that." But there's such comfort in seeing your child through a bout of croup and having him acting like his usual self again, even if that means he's talking your ear off until 3am.