The kids have been sick all this week. Since I work from home and my wife doesn’t, I’ve been the one who gets to be the day-nurse.<\/p>\n
Tuesday was the toughest. Both the kids were running triple-digit fevers, and I was still under the delusion that I could get some work done while I took care of them. When lunchtime rolled around, I cooked a hot dog for the oldest and a piece of toast with apple sauce on it for the little guy.<\/p>\n
I laid lunch out on the table and rustled them up from their couches.<\/p>\n
“No Daddy,” my five year old moaned. “I can’t. I’m too cold.”<\/p>\n
“But it’s toast with apple sauce,” I said. He loves toast with apple sauce on it when he’s sick. <\/p>\n
“I know,” he shivered. “But I’m so cold!”<\/p>\n
Fortunately, we have a good solution for that here in Florida. I opened the back door and moved the plates to a table on the porch. “There,” I said. “We won’t be cold out there.”<\/p>\n
He laughed, his older brother cheered, and we settled down to our lunch outside.<\/p>\n
A few minutes in, I noticed the little guy wasn’t eating his toast. “Hey,” I said. “You have to eat. You need the energy.”<\/p>\n
“I can’t,” he whined. “I’m sick. I can’t eat when I’m sick.”<\/p>\n
“It’s not that kind of sick,” I said. “Your tummy’s not sick. You need to eat.”<\/p>\n
“Remember?” he asked. “Remember last time?”<\/p>\n
The last time he was sick, I forced him to eat and he threw up all over the place. “Yeah,” I said. “But this isn’t like that. I didn’t know you were sick then, and that was a tummy sickness.”<\/p>\n
He picked up his piece of toast and took a hesitant little bite.<\/p>\n
“Aw come on,” I said. “That’s not a bite! Let’s see a real bite!”<\/p>\n
He laughed nervously, took a bigger bite, chewed – and threw up violently all over the porch.<\/p>\n
Whoops.<\/p>\n
“See,” his bigger brother said. “He told<\/em> you he was sick!”<\/p>\n Yeah, I got it big guy. I got it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The kids have been sick all this week. Since I work from home and my wife doesn’t, I’ve been the one who gets to be the day-nurse. Tuesday was the toughest. Both the kids were running triple-digit fevers, and I was still under the delusion that I could get some work done while I took […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-a9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}