Oh baby, I am so sorry . . .

What's missing from this photo?


If you answered "Vomit" you are correct!

Annie has this habit of jamming her fingers so far into her mouth that she gags and pukes. She doesn't do it often but this past week has been one for the record books. I showed up at the sitter's Wednesday evening to discover Annie had gagged and spewed in her car seat. The whole thing got dismantled and thrown in the wash once we got home.

Thursday: Rinse. Repeat. As the saying goes.

I think she is doing it to get attention from the three boys. She starts to put her fingers in her mouth, they start to tell her "No". She giggles and, well, mom and dad ( and Wendy ) do extra laundry that night.

But that was not the cause of the spewage in the high chair last night - it was just one of those spontaneous eruptions - perhaps brought on by eating too much dinner. So the whole thing got dismantled and washed. I am now an expert on how plastic chairs and nylon straps fit together.

Annie has also come down with a cold. We elevated the head of her crib mattress but could still hear her periodically hacking and coughing throughout the night.

This morning I drew breakfast duty and Annie sat in her (now clean) high chair gacking on phlegm and coughing, with big booger bubbles inflating and deflating from her nostrils with every breath. Every now and then a sneeze was thrown in for good measure sending crud everywhere.

Annabelle feeds herself dry cereal in the mornings and more than once she curled her little tongue like babies do when they cough and there would be a piece of cereal on her tongue "locked and loaded" which would go flying across the room to the waiting dawg who, as always, was on floor cleanup duty. The whole thing was a pitifully disgusting affair.

As I stood at the sink doing dishes and Annie sat in her highchair playing and bleching and sneezing and coughing, I had one of those first-time-father-firsts: I smiled at the wee one and said, "Oh baby, I am so sorry you don't feel well". But even as I consoled her, I knew this wasn't serious. I knew it would only last for a time, that colds are inevitable but they, too, shall pass.

I am able to smile and console with a calm assurance because I, of course, have been down this road many many times myself, even if she hasn't. It reminded me of all the times as a child when I was so miserably sick and yet my parents exuded such a calm, quiet strength; changing the bedding and fixing soup and doling out spoonfuls of remedy all the while convinced that I would be just fine in time (even though I was convinced I was dieing).

I think about other trials and difficulties in my adult life that are of far more significance than head colds and it causes me to pause. I hope that 30 years from now I am able to calmly soothe Annabelle in the face of her far more significant fears and stresses and heartaches which seem to be inevitable in this life; to calmly reassure her with as much grace and ease as cleaning upchuck for the third time this week.

I hope I am able to smile and say, "Oh, baby, I am so sorry you don't feel well" and have her look into my eyes and know that somehow it will all be okay - even if she is not sure how.