F is for Father, I mean Flexibility

If I have learned nothing else over the past three weeks, I have at least learned that the most important part of being a father is being flexible.  I am sure that flexibility will play an even bigger role as our son gets older.  Currently, flexibility is playing a role due to our son's incessant teething.  Having a nose that has been running like a faucet and a nagging cough that won't go away, we decided to bring him back in to see our pediatrician to make sure nothing serious was going on.  The good news; its just another cold, his lungs are clear, and it will eventually go away.  The bad news and the cause; after getting 8 of his sixteen baby teeth in his first year on this planet, our son decided that January of 2013, this month, would be when his last 8 teeth would start coming in, almost all at the same time.  They are in different stages of breaking through the gums, some are almost fully in, others are just breaking through, and a few more are just beneath the surface.  The main thing is, they are all there and they are all taking their toll on him.  I for one can't imagine what it must be like to have that many teeth breaking through at one time.  Yet, for all the pain he must be going through, he has yet to truly throw a screaming fit or act out in any way that signals he is in pain.  For the most part, he is suffering quietly, tears occasionally rolling down his little cheeks when it is really bad, but the majority of the time he just acts his normal self.  The only times he doesn't act normally is when the teething causes a spike in his temperature, which it did again yesterday for the third time in three weeks.  It almost seems routine at this point, a low grade fever, once a week, and a kink thrown in our schedule.  Yet, that kink is one that I would welcome any day as it means either my wife or I get to comfort our son as he deals with the fever and pain.  The only good side of these fevers is that they don't last long, perhaps half a day, and then our little man starts to get back to normal.   I think even he is getting used to them as yesterday he slept away pretty much the whole day. 

So I must make accede a certain point here; while F is for father and flexibility, it also fits with the mother, just perhaps not in the beginning letter kind of way.  Yesterday was perhaps our biggest test to see how flexible both my wife and I really are.  Both of us were obviously planning on going to work when we got up in the morning, however, once we got our son out of bed, saw he wasn't feeling well, and discovered he had a temp of 101, it became decision time.  Who had to go to work, how was our day going to go, what were our options?  Well, it all came down to us playing tag team yesterday.  My wife had to into work as she had to listen to end of semester presentations by her students, and while I didn't need to go to work, I wanted to get at least something done yesterday.  So first off, I stayed home for a couple of hours while my wife went to work.  She had a break late morning with 2 prep periods and as such was able to come home so I could go to work for a couple of hours.  I was home by lunch so she could get back to finish out the school day.  And finally, after she came home in the afternoon, I headed back out to get more work done till about dinner time.  It was a crazy day, but it worked out really well, and there was no added stress outside of worrying about our son.  While I am glad that I am flexible and able to roll with the punches so to speak, I am also immensely glad that my wife is also flexible.  The only factor that made our crazy day work yesterday was that I was working relatively close to home, about the same distance as my wife works from home.  All told, our commute yesterday was about 10 minutes one way.  If I had been working any farther from home, I would have just stayed home the whole day with our son. 

As I mentioned before, pretty much all our son did yesterday was sleep.  After he got up in the morning and started to fall back asleep while nursing, we didn't even bother feeding him breakfast.  Instead, we just put him back upstairs in his crib.  He fell right asleep and slept for a good two hours.  Once I got him up from that brief stint of sleep and got him some water, he fell right back asleep on my chest till my wife got home.  We swapped spots on the couch, our son now laying on her, and he fell back asleep till I got home at lunch time.  He had a few bites of food in between his sleeping, but it wasn't until after lunch time that he actually at something substantial.  And then, you guessed it, he fell back asleep on my chest.  Even in the afternoon when he was starting to feel better, he didn't really have the energy to do much.  At one point, I put him down on the floor, he walked to the center of our living room, and then walked back and climbed up into my arms where he just lay, resting.  The rest did him well, though, and he was looking and acting much better when I left for work the second time.  We have yet to see what this morning will bring in terms of demeanor and pain level.  Hopefully he is back to his normal teething self and not the feverish teething self.  Whatever the case may be, the only thing we as parents can really do is to comfort him and hold him while he gets through this.  The good side of all this teething, once these last 8 are in, the worst will be over with.  For his sake, and ours, I hope the fever side of the teething is done with.  I don't like seeing our son look lethargic and sickly when there is nothing I can do.  I would like to take the pain away from him, make it my own, but I can't.  I just give him extra kisses instead.  Oh well, our son is a trooper and I only hope the teething pain is now on its slow way out.