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S'not For Everyone

Sooner or later the honeymoon is over, and your sweet baby, your healthy, content, sound-sleeping angel, who has been functioning quite well up till now as a Bliss Delivery System, will finally succumb to her first cold and its accompanying Jeckyl-and-Hyde personality shift. The early warning signs: refusal to eat, sit up, lie down, stay awake, go to sleep, stay indoors, go outdoors, be held or be put down. Heed these danger signals or not, your baby is about to show you some new tricks, including the bubbly wheeze, the fever, the chainsaw cough, and oh, did I mention the snot? Copious amounts of it; thick as roofing tar.

But what to do? Our experience with Emma up to this point had been so warm and fuzzy it makes the Teletubbies seem abrasive, but suddenly, there we were, in the middle of the night scrambling around in the dark like Keystone Kops while Emma howled curses which, if translated from the original Infant tongue, would be uprintable. As the 6 AM wake-up call drew near, we realized for the first time how easy we've had it. Our respect for parents with "special needs" children was distilled to pure awe.

There is nothing so pathetic as panicked yuppies. We hauled out the baby-owner's manual, an encyclopedia-sized book whose cover features a gratuitous close-up of a Professional Model baby. The author, a frizzy-haired, lab-coated Child Development Specialist, looks like a man who could scare the rubber pants off a baby just by sticking his head into the room. He devotes a long chapter to colds, their symptoms and causes, and mainly about how you can't do anything to cure them. Since babies can't blow their own noses, it is necessary to -- and this certainly caught our attention -- suck the snot out of their noses for them.

This was a curious bit of information to ponder in the middle of the night, and it started a brief and confused argument over who would do the dirty work. Neither of us wanted to set a precedent. Imagine my relief at dawn as I re-read the chapter in better light and realized that this task is accomplished with a little rubber bulb called a "snot sucker," or in mixed company, an "aspirator." This was more like it ... I had feared something more like a snakebite scenario.

With much relief I packed Emma down to the drug store (it used to be "Thrifty" before being taken over by Rite-Aid, a.k.a. "Kant Spel") to get properly outfitted. Once home and ready to get down to business, I made another startling discovery: Sick babies don't really want to be pinned down in a headlock while some evil alien scientist in a cheap rubber Daddy mask attempts to use an unfamiliar object with a pointed tip to suck their brains out via their sinuses. Jeez, who would have figured they'd have a problem with that? Certainly not the brainiac who "wrote the book" on baby snot.

He was right about one thing, though. You can't make the cold go away. What you can do, in the meantime, is make numerous midnight runs to the drugstore and spend lots of money in efforts to feel helpful. Aspirators, thermometers, electrolyte solutions, humidifyers, vaporizers ... parting with money always makes you feel as though you're doing all you can.

But nothing really helps, and the nights start to blend together. You can't lie em down, they're too congested, and no matter how exhausted they are or how soundly they fall asleep, they're going to wake up gurgling and hacking in ten minutes. Your only hope is to try to keep the baby upright and hope she can fall asleep that way. It's a good plan except that you must be awake all night to do it. What the heck, you're not going to get any sleep anyway. It's a longshot. You bounce, dance shuffle around, try the rocking chair ... just as you twist into an impossible position you hear one of those tiny little baby snores. Ahh, relief. Just one slight move to straighten your spine, and ... oops, back to the dance floor.

Another aspect to your child's cold which bears mentioning is that you and your spouse will also get sick, although not till after you've stayed awake for a couple of nights. Sleep deprivation serves the dual purpose of weakening your immune system while softening your brain, so you won't see it coming till it's too late. You'll just have a bizarre dream where lab-coated thugs beat you with rubber bulbs, throw you down a flight of stairs, and inject Krazy Glue up your nose and into both ears. Upon arising you will find, to your dismay, that it was not a dream at all ... they even left their rubber bulb behind.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.