Once again, I am taking care of a sick baby. This time he’s less sick! By that I mean that he’s less sick than he has been in the very recent past. He was rocking a worryingly high fever until yesterday. It had just been climbing and climbing despite our best efforts. Yesterday we returned to the doctor’s office, got a solid reassessment, and were prescribed antibiotics (which Gibby has been doing his best to spray into my face while I dose him). Now his fever has dropped significantly and he’s merely hungry, sleepy, poopy, sometimes cranky, and full of head-gunk.

I’m not caring for this sick baby alone, thank goodness. Ley and I have been swapping off or stepping in for each other as extra support. I have come to feel, however, that the nuclear family model is designed to break you. A mere two adults caring for a sick baby—with baby-induced terrible sleep and everything else—is a recipe for suffering. It’s a recipe for suffering even when those two adults take time off work. There really ought to be two to four more people on call all the time so that people can sleep, or do anything other than care for the baby. Even one more person would be a big help.

I’ve had these thoughts before.

We might have been able to avoid this fever if we’d found a better way to manage his congestion from his fever two weekends ago. He produced lots of snot while fighting that (milder) fever. That was good, mucus helps! He didn’t manage to eject all that mucus though, and his resulting congestion likely fed his current ear infection—in other words, his body’s healthy reaction to the previous virus created fertile ground for this bacterial infection. Next time he gets snotty and feverish, we’ll need to find more ways to help him drain all the mucus instead of allowing it to linger and get infected.