Jared! How to describe him? Sometimes there are no words! He is my adventurous middle son, always jumping headfirst into everything...literally. Last week Jared came to me with a rash on his neck, which isn't unusual because Jared has ultrasensitive skin. I didn't think much of the rash because I had been slowly working to switch laundry detergents by adding half of our old to half of our new, and I had been specifically watching for a reaction from Jared. I rewashed all of his clothes and bedding in the old detergent and figured the rash would clear up with that.
A couple days later the rash has spread all over his chest, his neck, his face, behind his legs. I put him to bed with some benedryl and had a nagging feeling that this wasn't good. At 3 am he comes in our room in a panic. He is itching sooooo badly he can't sleep and is frantic for an icepack. At the same moment Patrick and I both say, "he has poison ivy." Now we did this poison ivy thing with him last spring and can I say it was 2 miserable weeks of h-e- double hocky sticks (Jared said I can't write what I wanted to write for that). We woke up every two hours every night for 14 days changing icepacks on his arms and rubbing creams on him and giving him medicine...basically doing anything to keep him comfortable enough to sleep. He was a trooper and rarely complained and we got through it, but we definately didn't want to do that ever again. We're doing it again! SIGH!
Now the big question....HOW did this child get poison ivy again? Again, meaning the 3rd time again. In the middle of the night it finally came to us...geocaching. Patrick and the boys had gone off in the brush searching for a geocache on Saturday and Jared had even pointed out a tree that had poison ivy on it and warned everyone away from it. Apparently he found another source. I don't know if he just rolls around like a dog in nature or what but he managed to cover his entire body in this stuff. Really, it is a shame that bad poison ivy has no monetary value because this knack he has for finding it could've be quite valuable.
So....today he stayed home from school. Apparently the solution we soaked on him and the benedryl cream we rubbed on him ten minutes later had a mild exothermic reaction (Mr. Faddis, my HS chem teacher would be so proud of me for remembering that word, although Jared wasn't really impressed with my scientific knowledge at that moment!) Over the top of his hysterical screams I was able to get him to head up to the shower and wash everything off. At that point...I was too wiped out with trying to get him to school, and honestly his chest looked so swollen and red I thought he really couldn't make it through the day there.
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