Sickness.

Stayed home with the boy today. He woke up around 1 last evening just when I was up getting a bottle of water: "Daddy! I wake up!"

I sat in the living room with him - he requested to watch football on TV (again, it makes my heart swell) - when I noticed that he was a bit warm. I took his temperature under his arm. 99.5. (Add a degree for taking his temperature under his arm, and that brought his real temperature to 100.5. Crap. And football? Well, NFL Network was replaying the Titans-Colts game from this past Sunday. Crap again.)

After they replayed Bironas' game-clinching 60-yarder (yep, he hit it again - crap again), I started to snooze in the chair when Son got up and asked me to come lay down with him in his room. I obliged. We fell asleep to Thomas The Pain Train on the TV in his room.

Wife came to the bedroom door around 4:30 and woke me up; Son had crawled into bed in our room. "He wants Daddy," she said.

Crap again. His bed is so much more comfy than ours. Alas, I got up and went to our room.

He still felt warm when my alarm went off at 5:15. I laid there awake for awhile, dozed off once more, then woke up again at 6:30. His fever hadn't broken, so I called all of the people I have to call - the 4 people I have to report my absence to at work, plus the new daycare, the owner of which informed me that she had sent another child home yesterday with a 103 fever, diarrhea, vomiting and the creeping croup in his chest.

Oh no.

Fortunately, none of the other symptoms manifested themselves over the course of the day, though Son's temperature did creep up to the mid-102s about late afternoon. The fever can most likely be attributed to his back teeth finally starting to come in (seeing as how he's been complaining about his mouth hurting the last few days), as opposed to the exotic germ laboratory that exists when you put together a bunch of small children in a daycare.