My darling boy, cherubic young thing that he is, had just gotten over the head cold that was the result of the bout of croup he had earlier this month. (Seems to take about two weeks for him to divest himself of all the symptoms.)
He started sniffling again on Saturday.
Isabelle is the girl that Amy looks after several times a week when her mother is allegedly at work. (More on that later.) She was dropped off early last week with a bit of a head cold of her own. I think she was overly kind and shared it with Declan.
There is something incredibly entrancing in watching your son sitting and quietly snuffling on your wife's lap in the living room and observing the snot bubble steadily inflate and deflate with every breath that the boy takes. (His other nostril is the one that's completely plugged.)
What is not so entrancing is the ensuing sneeze that ejects a long, clear stream of mucous whose tail end just manages to retain a hold on the rim of the boy's nostril.
One of my favourite games that I remember from elementary school was 'Crack the Whip'. Everybody would hold hands and run in a straight line like a long snake. The 'head' of the snake would abruptly turn and run 180 degrees back down the body with everybody following suit. The handful of people at the end of the snake would almost invariably get 'whipped' off, beautifully demonstrating Newton's First Law of Motion: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
a.k.a. - Inertia can be a bitch.
But I digress.
The tenacious grip of the tail end of my son's olfactory ejection resulted in two things: One, it did not hit me. Holding my face so close to my son's in a hypnotic trance resulting from his pulsing nose-bubble was not a good idea; thankfully, I didn't pay for it. Two, the string that would have hit me instead got a good grip on the boy's nostril and cracked the whip to land on his own cheek, eye, forehead and hair. And mom.
I'm almost ashamed to say I was giggling while I was sprinting for the kleenex box, my grimacing wife restraining our boy's arms from spreading the damage. There is little else that grosses her out more than snot outside of its native environs.
So with a full weekend to fester, Declan's head cold went to bed with him last night and woke us all up before midnight with the barking cough reminiscent of just a couple weeks ago.
Today, we're blaming the little girl for our lack of sleep and my insistence on writing snot and mucous so many times in a single post.
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