although odin has had the occasional sniffle and sneeze that indicates a mild cold, we’ve been extraordinarily lucky in the past 637 days or so since we been home from the nicu to never really have to deal with the flu or fevers.

but yesterday, seemingly out of nowhere, he developed a 103.5 F ( 39.7 C ) fever. other than feeling hot, he doesn’t seem to have any other obvious signs of the flu. no crankiness that one might expect from feeling achy. no diarrhea. he’s not eating much, but when he does eat he doesn’t have a problem keeping it down. had he not asked to go to bed yesterday at 4 p.m., he was by all accounts acting fairly normally for a toddler. today he was perhaps a little bit more “spacier” than usual and maybe he had just a bit less energy, but anyone other than us probably wouldn’t have even noticed anything was wrong until they tried to pick him up and discovered he was scorching hot.

i thought maybe he was getting his two year molars and that was making him fevery, but if teething is ever even associated with a fever ( some say it’s a myth ) it’s apparently does not cause high fevers.

we’re not super amped up about it yet and he hasn’t even required so much as infant tylenol but i might change my mind if it lasts much longer than 36 hours. a neighbor who also happens to be a nurse told us that a kid’s temperature can be all over the place and is less a reliable indicator of overall health than it is when he gets older. in other words, i guess we shouldn’t start filling the bath tub with ice just yet.

the worst part for odin? he hates, hates, hates getting his temperature taken with a thermometer and getting him to do so involves long negotiations usually resulting in a concession of ice cream on our part . maybe some part of him remembers that a thermometer under the arm was part of The Not So Much Fun Routine.