Overwhelming

Being a parent has been so overwhelming these past months, back through the holidays really that I've been lame about posting. I don't want to just complain and bitch and moan, but if I can't always put an entertaining spin on parenthood at least I can be real and post about the underside of parenting that you're parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents don't talk to you about because they want you to have kids.

So the illness continues, it seems like two out of five days one or both of my boys are sick, and if one of them is sick then they other one will soon be, and then I'm next, and my wife catches it about half of the time, I guess because she spends more time out of the house than I do. Being sick so much takes a toll on my psyche, I hope it doesn't do so to the kids as well. On top of that up until a couple of weeks ago for two months four out of five nights one or both of my kids diapers failed them in the night. I had to wait a month to switch my toddler to the next diaper size because we had a big assed Costco box to get through before switching up to the next bigger size.

The preschooler brings home a cough, virus or sniffle about once a week, which turns into a cold or flu about twice a month. Right now we're all ill, my preschooler threw up at school on friday and now has an infection in both of his ears. At first when we called the doctor's office they were like just give him some Motrin and deal with it, he'll get over it in a week, but then he got to the point where if he wasn't sleeping he was crying so I brought him in to see the doctor. We didn't get to see our doctor of course, which always seems to happen when you are really sick and don't have an appointment, anyway the other doctor wrote my son a prescription of Amoxicillin, which was cool because they hardly ever prescribe antibiotics anymore.
So this morning my wife notices that our son's right ear and pillow is covered in dried blood.
We call the doctor for the third day in a row now, he gets back to us and says that it's not out of the norm for a child's ear drum to burst (or as my wife kept saying "explode") and bleed.
Okay, not good but nothing to be worried about.
Later that afternoon my son is trying to talk to his maternal grandmother on the phone and he can't hear her with the phone up to his right ear ... my wife however can hear her mother through the phone, and has him switch the phone to his left ear, with which he can hear her.
Needless to say we're a little freaked out, and call the doctor's office again, now for the fourth time in three days which I'm sure they love, hours go by with no call back. Our regular pediatrician is one of the top doctors in the state and he does a really good job of letting us know what's going on with our children and what we can expect, his associate is good too, but sometimes seems bothered and is not nearly as communicative. For these reasons I wasn't totally panicked about our son's loss of hearing because, as I told my wife, I wouldn't be surprised if he just failed to mention that an ear drum "exploding" would result in a loss of hearing.
Well he gets back to us at the end of the day and states yes a ruptured eardrum would cause temporary loss of hearing for two to three weeks. WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO MENTION THAT WHEN I TOLD HIM MY SON HAD A LOW BUDGET HORROR FILM COMING OUT OF EAR, but hey it must be more fun for him to have us calling back all day and wasting both of our times.

Something about ear infections that I didn't know, they mostly come from water/mucus from inside one's head not outside, from things like blowing your nose and mucus shoots back to where your nasal passage meets you ear canal, or from brain ooze leaking into your ear canal, okay I just made up the brain ooze, but other gross internal fluid exchanges that I can't exactly remember right now.