Brody and his ear infections!

I just wanted to vent about a frustrating aspect of parenting - when your child is sick!! It sucks for so many reasons. Firstly, the compassionate side of you just feels so badly that they are miserable. Brody's eyes are bloodshot and his cheeks are red. His nose doesn't stop running and is so stuffy that he has to breath totally through his mouth. The other frustrating part of when your young child is sick is (now maybe not all kids are like this but Brody is) he feels so lousy but can't communicate it and doesn't know what to do so he just has a couple points throughout the day that he just whines and cries and stumbles throughout the house. I go to him and try to do all I can to cheer him up - I read to him, put a video on, put toys in front him, have him play outside and NOTHING helps.

As an adult we all just handle being sick so differently. Most of the time, if we can have a good sick day, we try to sleep through the illness. Well I think Brody is so miserable that falling asleep takes a while and sometimes the pain wakes him up in the middle of the night. Also to add a cheer on top to all this suffering, Brody is also teething so he is drooling so much and both his hands are in his mouth all the time (doesn't that just help spread the illness).

All this is thanks to Brody's daddy, he was the one that has brought the ear infection genes to this little boy. According to Jake and his Mom, Jake had a lot of ear infections growing up. No one in my family ever really had ear infections so this is all really new to me. Brody is just one of those children who are prone to ear infections and 9 times out of 10 even a little cold will go to his ears! Since Brody was born (so almost two years) he has had 6 or 7 ear infections and that isn't even enough to warrant tubes in his ears, I can't imagine how miserable it would be for Brody to have more.

I don't want anyone to think Brody is experiencing a really bad ear infection at this moment. Actually right now Brody is having a mild one. But the whole thing just reminded me how frustrated I get as a parent that when my child is in pain I can't really do much to relieve his misery.

These pictures are actually from Sept of 07 it was the sickest Brody has been so far. I didn't get a picture from this week when he looked bad.