Aug 1st, 2:40am, Randall woke up in the middle of the night. The ear thermo read 39.5°C! I got anxious. And that marked the start of two days at the emergency, three sleepless nights, and many unfinished meals. No other symptoms and the fever went up to 40.5°C the other morning after the medicine wore off. But all of a sudden the fever was gone, even more dramatically than the way it came. The doctors at the pediatrics emergency had tried to convince us that it was most likely some viral infection that we didn’t have to worry about. Now they proved to be absolutely right: red spots came out on his face and his neck and then spread to his tummy – it was Roseola, a common viral infection in young kids under 2 years.

Aside from the information about Roseola, we got another printout from Dr. Burke, the child’s pediatrician, which was the scientific facts about fever. It was a good one, to beat all the myths we had once had or had once been told by our own parents. However the best part of all these days is something I remember from the emergency room, a doctor saying to us (though sounding a little tired and impatient): “You can’t protect your child from virus. He’ll go to school. He’ll play with other kids…” That’s so true about everything, not only virus.

You gave birth to a new life, and now he is giving back, a whole different life, to you. This summer has been such an unusual one. The long hours I spend with the baby, along with the effort I make to avoid his tantrum, always leave me exhausted and with a bunch of work undone at the end of the day. Neither has the humid weather nor the busily working dad made things any easier.

But every once in a while, maybe when you finally get to feel a nice breeze in your face after a couple of gloomy drizzling days, you start to look at the bright side of the story. It’s this little guy who gets you to slow down, to enjoy the sunshine every afternoon, to squat and look at the world from a different angle in a different way.