Our son has Croup. For those unaware of Croup, here’s how Google defines it (seems to jive with what we were told): “Croup is breathing difficulty accompanied by a ‘barking’ cough. Croup, which is swelling around the vocal cords, is common in infants and children.”

This started Friday, when I received a call from my wife telling me Oliver had a fever. Our first thought, of course, was H1N1, so we made an appointment to visit Oliver’s doctor the next morning. After the Croup diagnosis, he was given a steroid to keep his throat from constricting. The main side effect of said steroid? A cranky toddler. The doctor warned us, but yeeeeeesh, this was unexpected.

Yesterday and today, he’s alternated between 20 to 30 minutes of good, sweet boy with about 5 to 10 minutes of extreme crankiness. The foul moods are accompanied by lots of punching and kicking. Yes, I’ve been hit several dozen times, mainly in the face and between the legs. Feel really nice, let me tell you.

The Croup also has affected Oliver’s eating habits. If we give him a solid food and he coughs shortly after eating, it hurts his throat and the food comes right back out. This scares him and he won’t eat again for a while. To get around that, we’ve been mainly giving him foods like yogurt and smoothies. (The bacon at breakfast was a HUGE mistake!)

We feel really bad for Oliver. Our poor boy has no clue why he feels the way he does. He seems scared and, when he’s not beating one of us during a crazy spell, he’s really cuddly. The Croup is supposed to only last for about three days, so we hope to be back to normal early this week. At least, we hope that’s the case. We’ll see …

As noted in my previous post, we took Oliver to Grant’s Farm on Friday with my family. There, Oliver got his groove on to some groovy polka music in the courtyard area while the adults enjoyed some complimentary booze. The employees got a kick out of the boy’s moves, as did we. Below is a video we shot. Enjoy:

Our son, who just turned 19 months old a couple days ago, doesn’t have the most vast of vocabularies. However, he’s starting to talk a lot more lately. Sarah and I wrote down all the words that he says. The list doesn’t include things that he repeats back, but rather words he associates things with and knows what they mean. For example, “mama” references my wife. He can say the word and knows that it refers to her.

Oliver is up to about 30 such words. Some are foods (“strawberries,” “Goldfish,” “hot dog,” etc.); some are pet names (our dog “Molly” and my in-law’s dog “Sage”); and some reference pictures from his favorite books (“gorilla,” “ghost” and “baby,” for instance). A few words crack me up when I hear them, including “shoo fly” (which is accompanied by the pounding of one of Sarah’s flippie-floppies on a window as he attempts to control the insect population) and “poop” (which he yells out in a long, drawn-out fashion when our dog needs to be let outside).

My favorite word, though, is “dada.” He screams it out amid giggles while I tickle him, and he calls it out to me until I join him inside one of the many “forts” we build for him on the couch. He also repeats the word over and over and over when I get home from work. There’s nothing sweeter than hearing “Dada! Dada! Dada!” after a long day of work, that’s for sure.