According to the nurse in the emergency room of the Mulletville hospital, it's croup. (I told you we should get frequent flyer miles from them.)
If you're unfamiliar with croup, it doesn't like rain forest-like conditions, which is what Chuck and I did to Junior's room pre-emergency room visit (crank the heat! blast the humidifier on "hot"!).
It likes cold air.
Junior got plenty of that on the way to the ER. By the time we'd arrived, he was almost fine. Don't you love that?
By the time we left the hospital, it was 4 a.m. We managed to get a steroid-injected Junior back to bed without having to suffer through a middle-of-the-night viewing of Curious George's A Very Monkey Christmas (wow, pukefest flashbacks), which is a good thing. A friend recently offered to place the DVD by my tire and cheer as I ran over it; all I needed was one more night of that damn monkey and I was there.
But back to the kid's present. Have you been to Target lately? Have you seen this line*?
It's called Battat, and the box wraps itself, like this:
All I have to say is, finally. There's nothing worse than birthday party waste—or any party waste. And this gift was only $9.99. They get it.
Know who else gets it?
Cute as a Buggy gets to go to Starbucks on me.

Congrats.
* No one paid me to write this post. But they should have. I'm writing with my eyes half-closed for frick's sake. Four a.m.!