Hell hath no fury...

... like a child who's been tricked into taking bad-tasting medicine.

My kiddo and I have been struck for the last week (give or take) with this blah head cold thing that's going around.  Not fun, but thank goodness it was that and not the stomach bug.  It's over quicker, but ugh... I'd rather blow my nose 447 times than throw up once.  And I'd much rather blow mine AND the kiddo's nose however many times than for both of us to be throwing up... because that would leave ye olde hubby o' mine in charge and since he's pretty much a sympathetic vomiter... yeah... it wouldn't be pretty.

So, anyway, I bit the bullet last Friday and decided to take Little Dude to the doctor, which I despise with every fiber of my being  since it's a den of germs and other microbial creepy crawlies this time of year.  And since it was the afternoon, which they leave open for call-ins I figured it would be worse.  As it turns out, I was right... there were about 4 dozen people waiting in the pediatric department, about half of them actually waiting just to check in, and the well-child waiting room had tumbleweeds blowing through it.  There were lethargic, peaked looking children languishing over the sides of chairs and a lot of annoyed or exhausted looking parents.

As it turns out, Doc said my boy had an infection in his left ear and a "croupy cough," which I'm 99% just means a croupy-sounding cough and not actually "the croup." She prescribed him the old standby amoxicillin (which turned out to be orange flavored and not pink and bubblegum flavored... what is the world coming to?) and a steroid (which sounds something like Prednisone but with an extra syllable) for his cough.

The orange-flavored stuff has not given us the first problem and he seems to remember that it tastes ok.  He's taken it just fine every time.  The steroid is a different story altogether.  The first time he took it I actually still had somewhat of a sense of smell and I could tell it smelled sort of like Robitussin, which tastes awful, so I imagine it's not good.  The first time he took it, of course, he didn't know what to expect and swallowed it right down and shivered and shuddered and made a whole range of entertaining faces.  The next 2 times, he went ahead and took it with some complaint... the next 2 times, most (if not all) came right back out.

So, I called Doc this morning to see what I should do about that and she informed me that if he seemed to be getting better that I could just stop the medicine altogether.  I'm not one to use punctuation with no words surrounding it, but ?????.  I'm wondering what the point is of prescribing medicine for a particular length of time if you can just stop taking it whenever you want.  Oh well...

I decided I'd go ahead and see how much of it I could get him to take without causing too much trauma or too much of a mess.  My mom suggested I try a spoon and just pour it down rather than using the dropper thingy I had been using which seemed to give him more of an opportunity to spew it back out.

So, tonight when it came medicine time, I got the spoon all ready, hubby restrained him, I tried to bribe him with mini marshmallows, he screamed and wiggled, and when his mouth was really wide open I just poured it down.

Now... I've seen this kid upset before, but Oh. My. Gosh.  He was what I'm pretty sure should be described as P'd OFF.  He thrashed like I've never seen him thrash and threw himself a little tantrum.  So, of course, natural reaction, my hubby started to fuss at him... and I was like, "Honey, he sorda has a right to be mad... I'd be pretty mad, too." So we just let him holler for a couple of minutes while I got him a few M&Ms out in a bowl and started a Baby Einstein video.  And, of course, as soon as he saw the Disney intro he started smiling and eating his snack.

Nothing a little chocolate and classical music can't fix.

It's remarkable how much this child is like his mother.