The Ten Stages of Having a Sick Toddler

Have family friends over for dinner. Enjoy a wonderful, rosy, innocent time watching your kids all play together. Suspect nothing.

Awaken with a start at 2 in the morning to your child crying and running hot with a fever. Administer fever-reducing treatment, snuggle, and then go back to bed while groggily hoping that by the morning, this will all have been a bad dream for everyone involved.

Discover that alas, your child is still sick. Poor little thing. Realize you have a meeting at work that you can’t miss. Poor little mama now, too. Suddenly recall right after remembering your meeting that you are literally experiencing That Thing that always happens in movies where the too-busy working mom is Too Busy to care for her sick child. How do all of those movies end? Oh yeah. The movie’s denouement will be all about how the good-but-flawed mom learns to relax and no longer care about her job in favor of her family. If it were any other day that Important Meeting day, though… Wince as you arrange alternative childcare.

Bring home lots of feel-better activities for a sick child. Bambi, some Peppa stickers, favorite crackers… Feel like a pretty great mom for thinking these ideas up. Come home a little early after the important meeting. Feel like the best working mom ever for making it work on the work-front and the homefront. A+ momming! you think to yourself.

Give the child some [fill in the blank with the fever reducing treatment of your choice]

Child will perk up! Child will not want to watch Bambi or play quietly with Peppa stickers. Child will want to run and jump! Child would like to become a one-ring circus toddler. Child would like to run marathons, climb mountains, swim oceans! Sick-but-medicated child has sudden energy enough for ten toddlers!

Try to encourage (still sick!) child to play quietly. They are sick and need rest! Perhaps they would like to eat some of their favorite crackers while watching Bambi? Or would they prefer to cuddle on the couch? Or maybe we could read a book together all snuggled up?

Finally get the child into pajamas and tucked into bed. Be happy that the fever seems to be on its way out now. Tomorrow will be a new, hopefully less-sick day.

Ruefully message the family friends you invited over to warn them that your little secretly-sick child probably inadvertently infected them all too, and to look for signs of a fever. Offer to lend them Bambi.

Watch as sickness replicates itself with each child in every family you know until it makes its way all the way back to your house again, creating an endless loop of secretly transmitted colds, fevers and tummy aches. Settle in to watch Bambi. It’s gonna be a long haul.