Lots of ups and downs. Grant certainly lives in the moment – like all toddlers and a distressing amount of law-makers – which means he is laughing and sassing one minute, and wheezing these dry little sobs the next. When his pain meds begin to wear off, he wants to go upstairs and lay down on me, so that’s typically my signal to give him his next dose. He started out by fighting every dose with all the power in his little body (“wow, he is weirdly strong,” the nurse said), but now he mostly just looks at me with sad eyes and hiccups through taking them. He dozes while waiting for them to kick in, then rises like a phoenix from the ashes to demand we take a walk in the rain, or play trains, or read a story.

I’m so relieved he is fighting the medication less, because besides the fact he needs it to both feel and get better, he’s on an every-6-hour schedule with the Motrin and an every-12-hour schedule with the antibiotics and ear drops. I am not quite hitting the 12 hour marks very well, but he’s getting his medicine when he wakes up and before bed, and I don’t have the heart for anything else.

Very unrelatedly, the ear drops are more than $200 after insurance 😱 thank goodness for our amazing insurance – I dread to think what they would be without it!