The Mizz is ill

It's been a while since we've had a sick kid on our hands, but daycare sent the first gift of the season home on Friday. The Mizz appears to have croup. I'd heard of this, but until Friday, I had do idea what it meant. It's a horrible sounding cough that apparently isn't normally too bad of a problem. As Yahoo! Health notes, kids with croup usually sound much worse than they feel or actually are. It's true, he sounds awful. His throat is not right, so as Franny noted, he sounds like Minnie Mouse -- much higher pitch than usual, which is an odd thing to hear from a toddler who is already pretty high pitched. The cough itself is often described as sounding like a barking seal. Geek that I am, I also think it occasionally sounds like Gollum. Other than the occasional horrible cough, the only symptom is fever. Not surprising, since apparently the most likely cause is the influenza virus. As long as we keep him calm and give him ibuprofen when he gets too hot, he seems to be doing okay. The real problem is proving to be sleep. He wakes himself up coughing and then is up for a while. It took me about 11 hours last night to get maybe 6 hours of sleep, and that was in four spurts. 6 hours is livable, but not when you do it like that. Franny is especially hit hard, since she's not getting much sleep as it is. We dug out the humidifier this evening. Here's hoping tonight works out better, although it hasn't started out well.