Noxious Weed

Even in the faint light of the morning in the boys dim room at 6:30 AM, I knew something didn’t look quite right. Harrison’s squinting seemed to be more than just from waking up. As I inspected more closely, I was quite alarmed that my darling little Harrison didn’t look like himself at all. I quickly snatched him up and carried him the bright lights of the bathroom. It was there that I got really worried. One of his eyes was almost swollen shut. The opposite cheek was bright red, and he had small white patches on his skin in a few areas. His upper lip was swollen, and once again, he did not look like Harrison.
While Sam calmly feed Noah his bottle, I nervously called our Dr.’s office. The after hours nurse ran me through a whole battery of questions and finally came to the conclusion that he had hives. My mind was racing trying to figure out what could possibility have caused such a reaction. His picky-ness at the dinner table (and breakfast and lunch tables for that matter) pretty much ruled out anything he ate the day before. He had started petting a neighbors dog out at the park recently, but no dogs had not been touched the day before. He hadn’t had any thing out of the ordinary.
Seconds after hanging up the with nurse, my phone rang. Strange, I thought, for 7:30 in the morning, and with thoughts of getting instructions to head to the emergency room, I nervously answered the phone. What was on the other end of the line surprised me. It was my good friend Isa, “Did Harrison wake up all red and swollen?” she asked. All at once I felt a lot better about the situation, but was still confused. Yes, I replied, he had - but how did she know? Well, luckily Isa was a lot better at remembering the activities of the previous day. The day before, Harrison and Chloe had found a strange weed in one of the gardens that was just their height. They stood there for 20 minutes or more tickling each others faces with the leaves of the weed, and giggling wildly.
The mystery was over, and now we just had to wait out the swelling and redness which later turned to blisters and sores. But at least we had a friend to go through it with. And at least we knew what caused the reaction - a noxious weed.

Mollie