Tag: snot

I aspire to be the sort of mom who doesn’t talk about vomit

My sons are generally healthy, fit, bonny little boys. I’m very, very blessed by their general health and fitness. But Grey has …. a quirk. When he was about seven months old (wee little Grey!) he got a cold. And with the mucous, he started throwing up. I was concerned, but figured it would pass.

It didn’t.

For about 6 weeks, Grey threw up several times a day. The worst day he threw up nine times. We took him to his doctor. We took him to a gastroenterologist at Children’s Hospital, who looked wistfully at him and commented on how healthy he was. The constant vomit never seemed to, you know, BOTHER him. We have reports that he smiled while throwing up. Because he was thriving despite it all, the doctors just sort of shrugged and said that anything further they did to figure it out had possible bad side effects, so it wasn’t worth doing. It was a grim period. You would not BELIEVE the laundry. Finally, we discovered that Prevacid stopped him from throwing up. He stayed on Prevacid until he was about 13 months old. The barfing did not resume the same way.

Grey threw up all over London!
Grey threw up all over London!

But… Grey has always thrown up at the drop of a hat. Potty training is an accomplishment. But I have my son VOMIT trained. He seems to have quite a bit of warning — usually — that he’s going to throw up and makes sure he has a bowl or a bag or a toilet or something. He actually does a great job of it.

But right now Grey is in the throes of an incredibly mucousy cold. And once he starts coughing, it seems to end up in vomit pretty often, and too quickly for him to take appropriate measures.

Yesterday coming home was AWFUL. He pitched a fit coming out of daycare (despite my best, best efforts to wheedle and amuse instead of order). It was a full-on tantrum of a type that’s become blessedly rare. Then he spit at me for two blocks (his aim has much improved — he hit me, which he wasn’t able to do previously). I informed him he would be going directly to his room when we got home. Then, as I was driving, he took off his shoe, threw it at me, and hit me in the head with it.

Images of Bush in Iraq flashed through my head. I pulled the car over and gave him about the third spanking of his life. I reserve corporal punishment for times he’s put his safety or the safety of others at risk. Throwing shoes at a driver counts for that. But when I say spanking, I do mean a few light swats on the butt, nothing more.

This did have the outcome of having him cry. And the crying led to coughing. Which lead to him throwing up all over the back seat of the car. Again.

I have had better commutes home.

The evening got a bit better with him. He did spend his timeout in his room and nicely apologized. He had some dinner. He went to bed.

This morning, he didn’t want to leave Spongebob and cried bitter tears. I got him into the car by reminding him just how unhappy the “sad” way had been yesterday.

We weren’t two blocks out of the house when he coughed and threw up AGAIN in the car. I turned around and drove back. My husband is home sick today. It seems unfair to put childcare duties on the sick, but welcome to 21st century parenting.

All this is to say: my car is at the detailers. It’s pricey, but there are some things you just have to ante up for. My husband is home sick with a sick kid. Thane is at daycare with an unexpected provider (Abuela has been in the Dominican Republic since August) and when I left he was pitching a fit.

I feel really, really tired but otherwise fine. There’s this sense of impending doom about that. There is no way I can be surrounded by this many sick, snotty people and not succumb. Even for a fantastic immune system (which I have) the onslaught is just too overwhelming. I can only pray that the boys are better by then.

Ah, parenting. Is it the glamour? The riches? The appreciation of our hard work? What keeps us coming back for more? Humanity is a wondrous thing, to choose to do this.

Which brings me to a thought I had last night. I was looking at the curly head of my baby boy, nursing in our remnant night nursing in the soft light from the hallway. And I realized WHY it is that parents hope their children also have children. Sure, there’s the vengeful belief that they should suffer as they have caused us to suffer. But mostly, we hope our children have children because there is no other way they will ever understand how much they are loved. It’s an impossible amount of love and invisible, I fear, to the recipient. Feeling that themselves, looking down at their own curly-haired snot-monsters, is the only way they’ll ever understand.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming

It’s always hard to return to writing after having posted something Deep and Meaningful. For example, my life today is deeply centered on poop, snot and laundry. It’s a hard come-down to go from summarizing a man’s life to poop, snot and laundry (although I suspect he would’ve been deeply sympathetic on at least the poop and snot counts).

We’re sick here at my house. Not like desperately sick. Not running fevers and throwing up sick. No, we’re snotty sick — the kind of sick that can go on for months without exciting too much comment, and you don’t realize just how not well you were feeling until you start feeling well again. I have a diagnosed secondary infection (and am on antibiotics). Thane has already had one bout of antibiotics and is now pathetically, sadly full of snot. Oh, the snot. The thing is, babies mostly breathe through their noses. And his poor, wee little nose is so clogged up, he can’t breathe. And them as can’t breathe, can’t sleep. Every hour or so his mother heartlessly tortures him with a suction device of great cruelty. His nose is bleeding from where snot-scabs had to be removed. Every breath is a snorffle of unhappiness. I have him sleeping in his swing. I do suction out his poor nose. I have the humidifier going. I attempted to torture him further, uh, help him out by irrigating his nose with saline. These are the remedies available in the 21st century, all the drugs of the 20th century having been proven not to help babies and may cause harm. Salt water and suction.

Grey is sick too. His nose is like a Hawaiian (that has far too many consecutive vowels) volcano, with overlapping floes. I’m not too worried about him. He’s discovered the joy of sleeves as stand-ins for tissues. I would argue, but it beats the couch.

We will not speak of the poop, except to say that finding the cat gift at 3 am last night elevated my poop woes to a level to which they needed not go. One grownup and four poop-producing-machines is really unfair odds.

My brother came out this weekend to help out, which was actually very helpful. He made it possible for me to sleep in. Ah, blessed sleep. How I missed you. He also kept me from feeling too lonely. I am a social creature by nature. I like people. Preferably people whose poop I’m not responsible for. But he had to go back down to Princeton this afternoon, so it’s just me and the poop-producers again. Grey is sometimes company, but he’s also started getting into things. I need to be more alert, watch him more carefully, set out clearer rules and consequences, and follow through. That sounds like work to me. I think we may play with computers tonight. That is less like work.

My husband will return to me on Wednesday. I in no way begrudge the time he is spending with his mother. There’s no more important thing for him to be doing. But I also miss him. Every time I think about how I miss him and how I miss having him around, I get all sniffly because my husband is gone for a week. My mother-in-law’s husband is gone.

The boys awaken. I think I need to bring them both to the doctor tomorrow, to see if they have drifted into secondary infections. Likely so. I can’t wait to go back to work!