Fever and Fun Things to Do

I rarely tell the kids what I’m considering doing with them, so I can avoid the inevitable heartbreak when something comes up and we can’t make it. But, I foolishly made an exception and told my 6 year old that we’d go to the flight museum on his teacher service day. Before I mentioned anything I scheduled the day off work, checked to make sure they were open, and there was nothing special going on that would preclude us from seeing any of the really cool stuff.

The afternoon before, he’s not feeling well, and by evening he’s running a full blown fever, headache, cough, the whole horrible, scary, painful, is he going to die thing. He wakes up in the morning and is, of course still running a fever, but much less so than the night before, at least by my guess, as we don’t have a thermometer, and he is adamant that he is absolutely fine, and he can go, and he’ll be fine. So after some discussion, and him assuring me that he really didn’t have much of a fever, I came to the compromise, (I know, I’m compromising with a sick kid, and I’m a woos Dad) that we’ll go down to the store, buy a thermometer, and if he’s over 100 we can’t go, if he’s under 100 we can go. His first question is, what if I’m exactly 100. Just a reminder, he’s 6.

We get to the store, look at digital thermometers, I had no idea that you could get the old glass tube thing we all had when we were kids, and find there are some that run $50. We rummaged around and finally asked someone and found the $4.99 one, which I’m fairly certain can’t measure temperature much less effectively than the $50 one, and probably much more accurately than my hand on his head. We buy it, sit on a bench at the store, open it up, read the directions, yes, for those of you wondering, I actually read the directions, which essentially said, turn on, put in mouth, (or elsewhere) and read the numbers when it beeps.

We followed the instructions and when it beeped, the display read 100.0. He found this amazingly humorous, and I accused him of cheating, and asked him how the heck he can cheat a digital thermometer, which continued the gales of giggles from a fairly sick little kid on the store.

Now, it’s fairly important to be true to your word, and I had actually hoped a lot that his temperature would be 99.4 or so, and I could just take him without any issue, but here I was stuck. 100.0 is pretty darn close to 99.4, in the big scheme of things, and I told him we’d have to stay low key, no running around, and resting some while we looked at the planes.

The day turned out well, he trooped through the whole thing with nary a complaint, although we did manage to start the day with a flat tire, and end the day with a dead battery. My personally assigned status of “Superdad” had been temporarily downgraded. Now to get through tomorrow morning.