Creeping crud

The “little” part in “our little guy” is still pretty pronounced in certain circumstances. For instance, he’s so little that he hasn’t even figured out yet how to wipe away snot with the back of his hand. Before my wife can even begin to overthink how big a deal to make out of attempting to extinguish such unseemly and uncouth behavior, the little guy would have to actually begin practicing it himself. But so far, no matter how steady stream he produces, it just accumulates above his upper lip. Sometimes he gets very quiet and still, I imagine so as not to cause the glob to spill over into his mouth, but he has yet to proactively remedy the situation.

Maybe my wife and I jump in too soon, too often, with Kleenexes at the ready, and maybe he would learn to do for himself if we would stop doing for him. I don’t know. It’s difficult (not to mention gross) to just sit back and watch him contend bewilderedly with the cruder discharges of the immune system on his own, and not that difficult to wipe his nose every few minutes. Which we certainly kept ourselves busy doing this past Sunday.

The sheer volume of Kleenex sacrificed in Sunday’s efforts would seem to indicate that the child had not just the usual default runny nose of toddlerhood but an actual cold, but by yesterday he seemed to be well on the mend, the incident destined to be a soon-forgotten blip. So it was doubly ugh-worthy when both my wife and I woke up this morning with various cold symptoms of our own (congestion, fatigue, sore throat, general feeling that this is some kind of leftie conspiracy to retroactively justify Obamacare). (Note: some symptoms may only exist in the mind of fat moronic blowhard talk radio hypocrites.) Not enough to keep either of us home from work, just enough to be aggravating.


For what it’s worth, the little guy still seems better than he was on Sunday, so hopefully the family-wide incident will itself be a soon-forgotten-if-largish blip. I’m trying not to put too much credence in the thought that it could become a vicious cycle in which everyone in the house keeps re-infecting everyone else. But if I go suddenly incommunicado later this week, you’ll have some inkling as to why.