Saturday Night Fever

So here we are on vacation in Paradise and our little boy is sick. Somebody has to stay with him at all times since when the fever decides to spike he can't even wake up never mind sit. Yesterday afternoon his poor sun-starved mother spent three hours in the hotel room while he snoozed on, simmering like a little tea kettle in his fold-out bed. She is such a good mother, this green-eyed girl. You can tell just by looking at her what a nice mother she is. Here, ha ha see if you can pick her out in this photo with her grad school classmates. (My kids tell me everyone already knows this but clicking on any picture in this kind of setting makes it VERY BIG. (It's fun, try it! It's like accordion-folding the paper that comes wrapped around your drinking straw, then S-L-O-W-L-Y releasing little drops of water on it, see? Cool, right?)

Anyhow just as she was getting ready to dress up and go out to this fancy dinner with the rest of the family when he woke up from this three-hour nap.And his temperature in the ear was 103.8 .Which is why she had him in the tub when I knocked on the door of their hotel room.I had long ago offered to do babysit on this night. I have trouble with long fancy meals anyhow: ninety minutes in I'm either fighting the urge to lie down under the table and blow spit bubbles or else I'm saying things like "What about the POOR? Why don't we give all these food dollars to THEM?!"I hurried right in to the bathroom, expecting to see a bright-red child, but no. He was pale and floating on his back, his little body stretched out full length. "Hi, TT" he said in funereal tones but then the Motrin must have started working because by the time his mum has left and I had dug into my pocket and pulled out the little gel capsules with baby dinosaurs in them he'd perked right up.The Sex Ed seminar he had in mind for me started there.I had told him about how we could just toss these capsules into the warm water and the babies would emerge, but no; he insisted we help "deliver" them.Which led directly to talk about the wonderful world of underpants. He pointed and said that HE had a penis whereas I was just flat on the bottom."Wo!" said I and asked if he had never heard of Mister Rogers and "Everybody's Fancy," the world's most instructive song. Then I sang it a few times. Care to join me?Some are fancy on the outside.Some are fancy on the inside.Everybody's fancy.Everybody's fine.Your body's fancy and so is mine.Boys are boys from the beginning.Girls are girls right from the start.Everybody's fancy.Everybody's fine.Your body's fancy and so is mine.Girls grow up to be the mommies.Boys grow up be the daddies.Everybody's fancy.Everybody's fine.Your body's fancy and so is mine.I think you're a special personAnd I like your ins and outsides.Everbody's fancy.Everybody's fine.Your body's fancy and so is mine.Then we forced a couple of more dinosaurs into the world, he chanting "Come on Little Baby!" Then he turned to me and said "YOU never pushed anyone out.""Oh I didn't, huh? You know that green-eyed lady that just kissed you goodbye 30 minutes ago? You know the two others that look kinda like her only one of them has a hairy face?""Did you push Mum out? And Auntie? And Mike?""You bet I did."He floated a little longer among his foam menagerie thinking and singing. Then I toweled him off and tucked him back into his little sickbed."I need my children," he said and gathered to him both Bruce the babydoll and Pedro Hispanic Boy, so named by the surely-well-intentioned but still-slightly-missin' it toy manufacturer Kaplan, who, I clearly remember, also provided the cheerleading phrase "Multicultural Babies are a World of Fun and Snuggles" under Pedro's picture where I first saw it on the Internet."I pushed these two out," said our little boy with sleepy satisfaction and who would argue with that? The point is they were here with him now. And for all I remember of any pain associated with the pushing-out that I did so long ago, my own kids might as well have been ordered up in gel-caps. And his fever was down, for now anyway. And I could go to the next room with my book and listen to his sweet breathing all free of the need to blow spit bubbles or denounce dining out in fancy restaurants.