The week it's been

You may remember from my last post that my son was quite sick (croup).  Well that sickness jumped to my wife, then to me.  All three of us were sick for several days, making it a rough few days.  I stayed home in bed the past three days, trying to get better.  Not fun being sick - and not fun being sick on your birthday! - but at least there were a couple of bright spots.

One was being at home with my family for a few days.  Again, we were all sick, so it's not like we were playing games and going out and having fun.  We stayed at home, did nothing, and tried to get better.  But it was still nice to be together.

The second thing was that I got to watch a lot of the Olympics!  Sick at home in bed, what else am I going to do?  I love sports and the Olympics, so I wasn't complaining about this part.  In hockey, the quarterfinal game between Canada and Latvia was amazing, and the women's gold medal  game was fantastic.  Seeing Jennifer Jones win gold was cool too, as was the gold for the women's bobsleigh team.  It's great to see Canada doing so well, and it's really fun watching the Olympics...and yet...constantly in the back of my mind is the fact that they spent $57 billion in setting up these games.  No matter how fun and exciting the games are, can we really justify spending that much on sports when that money could be used to do SOOO much good around the world?  There are starving people who need food, wells that need to be built for clean drinking water, homeless people who are just trying to stay warm at night, and thousands of other social issues...  These are matters of life and death, and we spend $57 billion on sports??  Yes, the Olympics are a global stage, yes they are about uniting mankind and humanity on something we can all enjoy, yes they are about dreaming big and striving for your goals, yes it's about inspiration.  Yes, clearly it's about more than just sports.  But are we really uniting mankind when half the world's population is too poor to have a TV or internet to follow the Olympics, and when many countries aren't involved?  Is someone who is wondering where their next meal will come from - and if they'll even last till then - really going to be interested in who the best skier in the world is?

I wasn't intending to write a blog on social conciousness when I started this post, but it's near and dear to my heart, and as much as I love watching the Olympics, I can't separate it from the bigger picture of a broken and hurting world.  It just seems like we have our priorities off-kilter.  Imagine half that money was used for social good - $28.5 billion.  How far would that go??  Now imagine you were one of those starving/thirsty/homeless people, and you found out that $57 billion was being spent on sports while you were on the verge of starving to death...  Changes things a bit, doesn't it...

The pain of fatherhood

I know I talk on the radio and blog about my son a lot, but I can't help it, I'm a proud papa.  But what happened last night showed me that I REALLY love him.  I mean, I always knew that before of course, there was never any doubt, but last night just made it more real.

Yesterday my son (13.5 months old) had a pretty bad cough.  We decided that if it got worse we'd take him to the doctor.  Well last night, it got worse.  He had that cough that sounds like a seal barking...that really painful cough in the back of your throat and in your lungs.  But what made me really nervous was hearing him breathe.  He was labouring, especially when he was coughing.  Every time he inhaled, it sounded like he was struggling for air.  It was killing me, I couldn't stand to hear him like that.  So there I was in the middle of the night, trying to comfort him and get him back to sleep while my wife was surfing the net looking up what kind of cough he had.  We found that it sounded a whole lot like whooping cough, and then I found out that that's potentially fatal for young kids...and at that point sleep was out the question for me.

You might be wondering, "If you were so worried and it sounded so bad, why didn't you take him to the hospital right away??"  Simple.  Because it wasn't actually that bad.  I'm a first-time parent who was over-reacting a bit, and I knew it.  He only had one or two short coughing fits throughout the night, but the rest of the time he was sleeping well, breathing fine, and not coughing.  Deep down I knew it wasn't as life-threatening as I was making it out to be in my head.  But those couple of coughing fits...some of the worst sounds I've ever heard in my life.  I was just wishing I could help, wishing I could do something, anything to make it better, wishing I could take it for him so he could just sleep and not be struggling or in pain.

And then I realized...that's how much God loves US.  I'll let you take that one to think about.

For those that are curious, we took him to the doctor this morning.  He has a respiratory infection, maybe slight signs of whooping cough, but nothing that won't go away with the use of an inhaler.  He should be okay in a few days.