Better

I just couldn't let that woebegone picture of my poor little bun sit there any longer than absolutely necessary. Last night was kind of rough -- Max went to bed early, by his own request, with an all-time high fever of 103.4, a dose of tylenol, and a yellow pillow from Ikea that he loves for some reason. He slept more or less through the night, and his fever never went up quite so high again, but he was restless and kept crying in his sleep and saying those inexplicable and somehow creepy things that people say when they talk in their sleep: "Get them all off me!" "What is that red thing? What are all those colored things right there?!" "That big guy is bothering me a lot!" I alternated between testing his forehead for fever, soothing his anxieties, and scanning the shadowy corners to make sure that there weren't really any colored things or big guys in the vicinity.
This morning Max woke up, fever-free, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, cheerfully demanding all the treats he was offered yesterday but passed up because he was too sick to enjoy them. He thanked me for taking care of him, and thanked his dad for finding his favorite pair of stripy underpants. In other words, his sunny self seems to be back in action and to have suffered no permanent effects.