Sick baby

Traveling with a fourteen-month-old is no joy at the best of times. Travling with a fourteen-month-old who is also suffering from a nasty cold, complete with green goo out of his nose, lots of sneezing, barking coughs and high nightly fevers is no fun at all. Add jet lag and four new teeth (molars!) and life is quite miserable. I must say that for all of it, Alan is handling it pretty well. He loves his cousins and enjoys his stay a lot. The nights are hell but in the meantime we learned to dose him heavily with all sorts of meds and somehow make it through. We get lots of smiles during the day (interspersed with whiny episodes, of course) which is pretty amazing considering his general state of health at the moment. My brave little boy... [Doug here] Having the baby wake up at 0100 with full-throated screams and a 103/40 degree fever is indeed no fun. But he is a sturdy little guy, and the smiles do make it worthwhile. It's a delight to see him playing with his cousins. Or, to be precise, his cousins playing with him -- at fourteen months he's still a little blurry on the idea of "play with", but the cousins just pick him up and put him down as circumstances require. We took him downtown to Dupont Circle today. He played on the edge of the fountain and listened to the bongo drummers and in general seemed to have a grand old time. Oh, and his Baby Chick Magnet powers are still working, green goo notwithstanding. ("Oh, does he have a sniffle? Oooohhhh!") We're none of us looking forward to the trip back across the Atlantic, but at least we know the thing can be done.