The Miracle

We were sick this weekend, dreadfully sick.  I got it first:  Friday night a fever, aches and chills, as bad as I can ever remember having (though thankfully one tends to forget), and all through the day Saturday, torture and misery.  NyQuil downed, dosing off Saturday night, Talia whispers she thinks she's getting sick, too, and Sunday morning, oh so early morning, we surface to discover she's as bad as I was and I'm no better.  And any minute now the boys will wake.

It doesn't get any worse than this.  Simply lying still is painful; to have two children crawling over you would be unbearable, and yet that's what's going to happen.  I literally despaired.  I don't recall if I had energy enough to cry.  Probably, somehow, I did.

And then the miracle happened.  The morning noises began, but instead of Gideon yelling to be released from his crib, instead of finding that Felix is already in our bed and busy kicking us awake, or, an equally inconvenient scenario, doing his morning business and hollering for the cleanup crew, instead of this which is our daily lot and has been for months and months and months since the time of the dinosaurs or earlier, we hear some door openings, some minor busyness, a door closing, and then nothing much else.  Felix--our hero, our lovely, lovely, little hero--had arisen, gone to the kitchen to fetch Gideon a snack pack, returned to the room, and fed his brother.  And more: he then levered the baby (who is, it should be noted, fully 2/3 his weight) out of the crib and proceeded to play with him for an hour.  I think I cried again at this point.

There is a postscript.  Felix has always been very reluctant to put on his own socks.  I quite understand why:  it is a tedious and difficult chore at that age, when both the socks and feet are small and finicky.  Birthday #5, I declared, is the limit:  thereafter thou shalt put on thy own damn socks, no matter how long it takes you.  Birthday #5 having come and gone, and the word having spread even unto the nanny, Felix started putting on his own socks, but never without a good deal of what I will politely term discussion.

Then suddenly, just a few days ago, Felix started putting on his own socks without a discussion, without even being asked, and it was only today that we discovered why.  He was ashamed of what had happened to his feet:

From Hand foot mouth: the miracle

That, horrified reader, is the trail of Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease, and that, horrified parent, is what he had given us this past weekend, for which, I must conclude, the Miracle was unwitting compensation.