Oh Crap – Croup!

We’ve had a rough couple of days. All weekend Liam seemed a little clingier than normal (he would not sit anywhere but on my lap at the Georgia game on Saturday, and all weekend there was lots of “Mama”…he has never called me Mama before – always Mommy). We didn’t think much of it, until Monday afternoon he woke up from his nap feeling warm. He had a little fever (100.9), so we gave him some Tylenol (fake Tylenol, since we replaced all our name-brand with Walgreen’s brand after their recent recall), and headed to the pool. We did stop to wonder for a few seconds if that was bad parenting…Anyway, at one point in the afternoon he coughed a little, and we knew right away that it sounded croupy. He’d been hoarse all weekend, but I just figured he had a cold coming on. Then we heard the cough, and we knew. But we hoped it was a fluke. By Monday evening his fever was gone, so yesterday morning we decided to chance it & take him to school. He had only coughed once or twice all weekend, so we thought it would be OK. I was halfway to work when Josh called to tell me that he thought we’d be lucky to make it through the day without a call from the school. Apparently he was starting to cough a little more, and since I didn’t have any meetings, I just turned around and headed back home. I met them halfway, so Josh could just continue on to work, and Liam & I headed back home. We went to the doctor and it was confirmed – croup. Apparently it’s going around, and lucky for us we knew exactly what it was (because you know how the first time you hear that croup cough, and you don’t know what it is, it can be a little scary). After the doctor, we went & bought a new humidifier, and picked up his meds, and then headed home. He took a nice long nap, and I was able to get some work done.

Then in the afternoon, everything sort of fell apart. I noticed it was really hot upstairs, and it seemed to be hotter each time I went up there. I checked the thermostat…83. Weird, since it was set on 78. I heard a click & a hum, but there was no air. Ugh. Seems our upstairs unit has frozen over. It’s really starting to piss us off, because this has become an annual event. Not to mention that we spent over $1300 in the spring to replace an evaporator coil, on what we believe is the other unit (this was my famous “thirteen-fifty” thing…A/C guy tells me the repair will be “thirteen-fifty”, so I tell him that’s no big deal, because, in my mind, I’m thinking “$13.50”. Yeah, I could not have been more wrong…he actually meant $1350 – as in one thousand, three hundred, fifty dollars – YIKES!) So we opened the windows back up last night & turned the fans on full blast. One more night of heat, and hopefully we get it fixed tomorrow…for less than “thirteen-fifty”.