Poor pumpkin

After a long enough gap that I'd started to feel confident he wouldn't get it, Nico came down with my Man Cold from last weekend. He started sounding a bit pitifully froggy on Friday morning, and by the time I picked him up Friday after work he was snot-nosed and had been given medicine for a touch of fever by Grandma. It was my sister's birthday (I got her this fantastically nerdy shirt), so we hung out for a bit and talked and shared birthday cake. We left around 6:30 and headed to the grocery to buy some kind of cold medicine for poor Nico, and he almost fell asleep in the car on the fifteen minute drive there. Spooked by the DO NOT GIVE THIS MEDICATION TO ANY CHILD UNDER FOUR YEARS OF AGE, YOU MONSTER labeling on everything with actual drugs in it, I bought him some kind of homeopathic hippie cough / cold syrup and took him on a little drive, figuring the car ride would put him peacefully to sleep. He was passed out (and snoring! Cute yet sad!) in his carseat by 7:20, forty minutes before his usual bedtime. Once home, I gave him a cocktail of baby Tylenol and hippie cough syrup and tucked him into bed. MB had gone to pick up his mother for a weekend visit, and I was hoping Nico would undergo a miraculous recovery by morning. Instead, the next morning convinced me that the hippie medicine was pretty much bullshit. After consulting the ever-helpful Twitter, I sent MB out to buy some actual damn Dimetapp, which knocked down Nico's symptoms enough for him to enjoy running wild with Mamaw all morning.

We had plans made pre-visit-plans to go to a beer tasting, so we left Nico at home with Mamaw only for the first time and headed out around 2:30. Mamaw and Nico watched his Pooh movie, she gave him more medicine, and then he fell asleep propped up against her shoulder just before 4:00 and ended up sleeping through the night (other than a sad wakeup for medicine). Today we wanted to take him to a farm with a pumpkin patch and I didn't want to postpone since his Mamaw was here. I gambled on another full morning of him being chipper enough and nearly lost. He was cranky and not very open to trying new things (and flat-out refused to wear his new Halloween shirt), so we had to coax him into just about everything. He did like digging through the big bin of corn, and would've happily done that all day if we'd let him. He wanted nothing to do with the big rolling cylinders they had set up for the kids to run in (no surprise…he was giving them his patented "That does not look OSHA-approved" skeptical stare).

"You must be joking."

He initially did NOT want to go near the big corn maze and got his first of three public time-outs of the day for smacking MB while MB was trying to talk him into trying it. I do kind of wish I had a photo of the moment when Nico stretched out flat on the ground in full-body protest of the horrible injustice of being taken to a pumpkin patch on a beautiful autumn day. As is typical, he seemed to enjoy the corn maze just fine once we convinced him to try it. Then it took us another eon to convince him to try the hayride out to the pumpkin patch. He was actually protesting as we climbed up onto the wagon, but my gut was telling me he'd like it once it started and - just like with the fire engine ride - my gut was right. As soon as we started moving, he was cheerful and even chirped "Woohoo!" while perched on my lap.

(I feel compelled to state for the record that this scale is off. Nico measured 39" at the amusement park on Labor Day.)

Out in the patch, he wandered from pumpkin to pumpkin, attempting to pick up any that caught his eye. MB finally helped him pick one that turned out to be a slightly lumpy, turnip-shaped Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree of a pumpkin. I started to tell them to pick another, but then I realized that first of all, we aren't planning to carve it, so its lumpiness doesn't really matter. Secondly, if Nico liked it, that was really good enough. Third, probably no one else was going to choose the poor misshapen thing, and I'm a sucker for the underdog, even when it's a pumpkin. Said pumpkin rode back on Nico's lap and is now in a place of honor in the center of our dining room table.

By the time we got home after our little adventure, Nico was pretty much out of energy to hold his shit together and I was tired and crabby myself. I could tell he was basically sick of my ass face and I was running low on patience, so I attempted to put us both down for a nap. He fought it and me for nearly two hours and of course he finally fell asleep five minutes before I was planning to give up and let him come out of his room. I'm glad he's resting, but I feel stupid for wasting the whole afternoon fighting over a nap when we could've been snuggled up on the couch watching cartoons together. I'm glad we managed to have fun today despite him not feeling his best, and I'm really hoping he's feeling better tomorrow. If not, there will definitely be less insistence on naps and lots more cuddling.


Reading:  Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz

Playing:  Babel by Mumford & Sons