Just a little before noon today I got my first call from Connor's elementary school. He wasn't feeling well and needed to be picked up. And, of course, I was standing in the middle of the store about half way done with my ridiculously large, once-a-month grocery shopping trip. Not exactly the phone call I wanted or expected this Monday morning.
Connor was sleepy this morning, I'll grant you. He was curled up into a little ball and was tougher than normal to get moving. Most of his clothes were put on with him still stretched out across his bed. But he did sit up when it was time for socks and shoes. And we eventually got him moving enough to go to the bathroom and then make his way to the kitchen for breakfast. Squeeze yogurt - two of them, at his request. And chocolate milk (after his first request for wild cherry Kool-Aid was rejected). Not a single complaint about not feeling well or not wanting to go to school.
But a few short hours later, he was apparently getting sick all over the school cafeteria. And maybe outside the classroom, too. And he's been sick again several times this afternoon. Poor kid. He keeps telling me he's hungry, and when I give him something simple like club crackers or dry cereal, that just comes right back up, too. And you can forget the medicine. He complained that his head was hurting and asked for the cherry Tylenol. It came up within minutes.
I guess I'm lucky he didn't get sick on me in the truck on the way home from his school or to and from his brothers' school. You see, I had a car full of groceries when I picked him up, and we had to rush home to put away the refrigerated and frozen stuff, then rush back to brothers' school to pick them back up. And then we came back home again where I got all of them settled and eventually put away the rest of the groceries.
At this point, his story of throwing up at school was just that. A story. Connor is good at them, and you can only believe about half of what he tells you. For the first week of school he swore up and down that they kept running out of milk and food in the cafeteria (turns out he was wanting an extra milk and they were telling him no). He also swears people throw food at him, which I'm pretty sure wouldn't be tolerated every single day even if it did actually happen at all.
So you see, I wasn't sure what to make of him being sick. When I found him in the school nurse's office, he was simply sound asleep. The nurse was tending to another sick student, so I didn't get to talk to her, just the other ladies in the front office and they weren't sure exactly what was going on. And though he was kind of pitiful, once we got to the car he kind of woke up and just started jabbering away. He was telling me about being sick, of course, but also about all the things he did over the weekend, who he saw at school today, and what he did before he got sick. He was even asking when he was going to play baseball next. He sounded fine, and I half-way suspected he was simply one very tired little boy who had finally crashed.
Clearly, he proved otherwise once we got home. He got sick three different times, all in the trash can we were keeping close by, thank goodness. Even after that part passed, he still couldn't even be roused enough to play with Aunt Kelly when she stopped by to visit, and she's one of his all-time favorite play buddies. He simply sat on the couch and quietly looked with her at the new glow-in-the-dark silly bands she had brought for him (baseball ones, even). He didn't even put them all on, like he usually does when he gets them. He just looked at them and then curled back up on the couch. And when I asked him if he wanted me to take him to bed, I got a rather pitiful "Uh-huh." That was about four o'clock, and he's been asleep ever since.
A rough start to our school week. Let's hope it's one of those quick, twenty-four hour viruses. It's too early in the year (and the baseball season) to be having tardies and absences!