The Never-Ending Snot Machine

The baby is sick again.  And considering he's only been sick a few times in his first year of life, I don't consider myself unlucky.  I've heard worse, and worser still.  Babies tend to get sick a lot, and mine has been holding off those germs pretty well.  Of course, this will all backfire on me when he goes to preschool and catches every plague on the planet.

Regardless of how minor or major a cold is, hearing your child bark like a seal pup and cough up phlegm and snot while struggling to breathe is absolutely heart-wrenching.  In my desperation to ease his discomfort, I begged for advice on the Internet.  Asking for trouble, perhaps, but I had no other option aside from calling the advice nurse...whose advice is always, "Is he acting normal?  Then he's ok."

The advice I received was interesting, and somewhat surprising.  Here are the top suggestions I was given:

1) A teaspoon of corn syrup.  Safer than honey and it coats the throat.
2) Hot steam.
3) Sleeping with him on your chest, or elevating the mattress so he can breathe easier.
4) Saline drops to loosen up the snot.
5) Erythromycin, which I looked up and could not understand the usage besides for eyes.
6) Humidifier.

I used the humidifier and the saline, but sleeping with him on my chest was out of the question.  At his weight, he would easily crush me.

I may become desperate and try the rest, but at this point, he's up and about and acting fairly normal.  Until he coughs up a lung, I think my HMO won't look twice at him.

Try, Try Again

I'm 40.  That would seem not-so-elderly to some, but in fertility world, that is geriatric.  If you get pregnant after the age of 35, you are considered a "high-risk" and you are given the very flattering term "geriatric pregnancy."  No kidding.

So at 40, my husband has been dropping big hints about trying again, saying stuff like, "I definitely want our child to have a sibling."  He sucks at subtlety.

And to tell you the truth, at 40, I've been thinking, "Hmm, I better get to steppin'.  I have no time to waste."  It's pressure like no other.  It's so much so, that I block out everything else that should worry me about having a second child and just obsess about HOW I will get pregnant and IF it is even possible at this point.

I'm so obsessed, in fact, that I don't even think about how little money we have for a second baby.  I don't consider at all the idea that we have no place to put a second baby.  I don't dwell on the fact that a second baby might be a horror-storm of colic, crying and basically the complete opposite of what we have now.

I don't waste a minute thinking about how dangerous it is to be pregnant at 40, gestational diabetes, miscarriage, the ridiculously high risk of Trisomy.  I don't ponder the terrible things that the odds tell women my age.  And it certainly doesn't even cross my mind that I have to go back to work soon, and that if I'm pregnant, I'll be pregnant...at work...and I'll be tired.  The kind of 40 year old tired that makes you want to die in your sleep.

So we started trying.  It's official.  I'm off my rocker.  Literally, because I'm THAT old.

"Real" Motherhood

I can hardly believe the kid is ten and a 1/2 months old.  He has grown so much I have to re-watch videos of him to remind myself this is the same baby I gave birth to in August of last year.  He is a big kid, by anyone's standards, weighing in at 26 pounds, 30 inches long.  And this is after he LOST weight.

Yes, crawling around and being Destruct-o Baby is great cardio, apparently...for both of us.  I've actually taken to groveling at this point, begging him to please DO NOT KILL MY MAGAZINES and NO EATING OF PLANTS AND/OR ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT, PLEASE.  Needless to say, it does not work at all.  Difficult baby.

It seems like over a period of two weeks, he went from, "oooh timid timid...maybe I can reach that ball if I try to wriggle my way over there!" to "ZOOOOOOM VRRROOOOMMM!!  EAT MY DUST, MA!"

He went from novice crawler to expert within a week, and now he's daredevil enough to pull himself up by his white-tipped fingertips.  He attempts it on any surface, wall, door, and usually succeeds.  And when he doesn't, like today, he crashes like a stunt dummy onto his head and starts wailing like he's being murdered.

Take today, for example.  Wonderful husband put up the baby gate at the top of the stairs.  Baby sees baby gate.  Baby attempts to scale baby gate.  Baby loses grip and falls on his head.

Oh, the bloody screaming begins.  Poor little dude couldn't catch his breath, he was crying so intensely.  I even got my first glimpse of the notorious "silent wail" that children sometimes do when they are so distraught they can't even manage a squeak for at least three seconds.

It was one of those moments that made me momentarily hate myself.  How could I not know he was going to whack himself in the head?  After all, I saw him struggling with the gate.  I should have been watching carefully.

Shamed, I checked his head, which had a lovely little goose egg that was already turning purple.  Great.  Feeling like a horrible mother, I held him for several minutes and tried to soothe his broken pride.  He eventually calmed down enough to pile his head onto my shoulder and just sniffle.

The moment of shame turned into the moment I felt like a real mom, perhaps for the first time.  Not that I don't feel like a mother all the time...exhaustion and sleep deprivation prove that I'm definitely the mother of this little tornado.

But when I felt his hand on my neck, his hot forehead nuzzling into my ear, I felt like I had crossed a boundary into REAL MOTHERHOOD.

In other words, I fixed my first boo-boo.

Ten Months

Someone wake me when he stops spinning circles around my comatose body, please.

The Baby Plague

When I mentioned to my friend that the baby had a runny nose and was cranky, her eyes widened.  Then she said there was a "THING" going around.  A big, nasty "THING" that doesn't go away.  It just stays around and tortures the baby until you all want to vomit and cry along with him.  The "THING" is going around, she said.

I pish-poshed and said, oh well.  This baby is impervious to this "THING."  He has not had a problem at all with "THINGS" since birth, aside from that little staph infection that planted itself on his little face for a week.  He's never had a cold, flu or virus, as far as I can tell. 

No sooner had I pish-poshed, the "THING" hit.  It hit hard.  The baby went from cute and adorable to OH MY GOD DISGUSTING SNOT EVERYWHERE.  It literally ran down his nose, into his mouth, and down his chin.  It saturated his clothing.  He would wipe his face with his hand, and before we could all yell in unison, "NOOOOO!!!"  he had snot smeared all over his eyes, cheeks, and forehead.  It was in his hair, ears and on his elbows.

Not only was my son covered in yellow sticky snot, he absolutely detested tissue.  I would come to him with a tissue, gently wipe his nose, and he would start howling like a car alarm.  Soon, he realized what I was coming to do when I would reach for the tissue box and start shaking his head before beginning his screams of agony.  To the outside neighbor watering his plants, it must have sounded like I was cutting off the baby's nose with a dull butter knife.

I let the snot go as much as I could, and eventually bought some saline and sprayed it in each nostril which went over as well as could be expected.  I cranked up the humidifier our psychic friend bought for us, even though we didn't register for it when the baby was born.

The snot turned from clear to yellow to green to OH SO MUCH GROSSNESS.  It was absolutely never-ending.  Yeah, I felt sorry for the little dude.  But honestly, I was starting to lose my patience with the "THING" that wouldn't leave.

I asked my friend how long the "THING" stayed around.  

"Oh, my kids had it for about two weeks."  She said in a matter-of-fact tone.

"TWO WEEKS?!  I'M NOT GONNA MAKE IT TO TWO WEEKS!"  I cried.

"Oh, we ALL had it for two weeks."  She deadpanned.  The sympathy drained out of her voice quickly. After all, I just had one snot baby.  She had two.  Plus a snot husband.  Who was I to complain?

So I set the calendar to two weeks.  Five days passed.  Seven.  The snot dissipated a tad.  Now, on the tenth day, I am happy to report dry, crusty boogers instead of the river of mucus.

However, the baby lost his voice, and now he sounds like Harvey Fierstein.  It's distracting, but at least he's not clawing my face off when I come near him with a Kleenex.  

Sick Baby

Dear People in Charge of The Universe,

Really, what is the point of snot?

Signed,

Exhausted and Sleepy

Nine Months

Crawling babies are dangerous.  They creep around on all fours looking to destroy things, checking out the little details you forgot about because you're four feet taller and can't see under the couch.  They're stealthy, like midget ninjas.  Very scary stuff, here.

I have been keeping one eye glued on my kid ever since he started trying to launch himself from a crawl position.  He has yet to be fully mobile, but he's trying every which way to get from point A to point B.  He scoots, when he can, and now he's actually on his hands and knees eyeballing that loose wire sticking out of the floorboards.  He is concentrating on it so intensely I fear he is calling upon The Force to bring it to him so he can clamp his little drooly mouth on it.  Frightening.

Nine months has been an adventure so far.  A scary, brain-melting adventure that is sure to kill me from a massive heart attack.

Without a Trace

Hi there.  I know I've been absent for a month.  The twelve people who read this blog may be wondering, "Gee, what happened?"  I'll tell you what happened.  Seven months happened.

It seems that there is a turbo charger build into babies that mature at exactly the seven month mark.  When that day hits, the turbo charger revs up and BOOM!  Your life is complete chaos and hysteria for God knows how long.  That's what happened, and that's why I've been completely off the map for four weeks.

At six months I thought, "Eh, this isn't so bad.  He's a little squirmy, but nothing I can't handle."

At six and a half months I thought, "Well, he's a handful, but I can keep up with him.  At least he's not crawling yet.

At seven months I though, "Holy Baby Jesus, save me.  Who fed the baby a double espresso?!"

And now, at eight and a half months, I feel as though my brain has been scrambled.  Keeping up with this big baby has been keeping me at my wits' end.  How am I supposed to keep up the pace when he's turned into an octopus baby, complete with sticky gecko-like fingertips that seem to grab everything in less than a micro-second?

Yesterday, after my husband came home from work, I handed him the baby and I literally fell down.  For no apparent reason.  Yup, just FELL DOWN.

I AM DOOMED.

Eight Months

Wow.  I need to hire someone to help me with eight months.  No one told me he'd turn into the road runner when he got this age.

He isn't even crawling yet.  I'm planning on leaving the country for a while when that happens.  If I'm this whipped when he's just on his stomach, cooing at me, what will become of me when he's fully mobile?!

He's grabbing something poisonous as I type this, I'm sure.  I must run, and take some Tylenol...and maybe some valium.

Observations

I've learned one thing in the last month or so.  Do NOT cut the little tags off the stuffed animals, blankets, etc.  Why?  Because these are the most fascinating things on the planet right now...according to the baby, that is.

He toys with the tag, not the toy.  That's the general rule at the moment.  If I give him the most amazing toy ever invented by man, he will go straight for the little white tag sewn into the corner of it and stare, mesmerized.  He'll touch it between his thumb and forefinger for a good ten minutes before losing interest.  And ten minutes in baby time is like ten hours to a regular adult.  It's a good long time to be transfixed.

He also loves to make noises with his lips.  Current favorite?  Raspberries.  Timing?  Any time he has food in his mouth.  

He's not a fan of anyone touching his nose or wiping any general area of his face.   However, he loves to have his neck cleaned.  In fact, he laughs when we do it.  Weird baby.

His nursing has gone from 30 minutes on each boob to a lightening quick four minutes on just one.  He's still a poor latcher, but has learned to eat quickly.

He naps in the morning for 2-3 hours, easily.  He nearly claws my face off in the afternoon when I try to put him down for a second one, which usually lasts about one.  

This baby is changing at such a fast pace!  I feel like if I don't write all of it down, I will forget it in an instant.  Things have been happening at such a quick pace, it's difficult to remember the little things that amazed me in the moment.  I'm afraid I will lose appreciation for him in some way if I don't hang on to the tiny, miniscule things that slip away so quickly.  We discover new things about the baby in an instant...and then it's gone.