Rite of Passage

Three weeks after starting daycare, Liam has come down with his first cold. We've been inducted into the neverending drippy-nose club. yecch. He's been mildly feverish since last Wednesday, so we stayed home on Friday to try to get it under control.

He's been pretty whingy and we haven't been able to put him down in five days. He's learned to avoid the handkerchief and knows all about the nose sucker, the poor wee wain. He's determined enough to keep nursing, but the noise he makes is enough to raise the hackles on my neck. It's like a cross between Darth Vader and the boy who sat next to me in third grade who unconsciously cleared his sinuses every five minutes.

When the warm steam humidifier seemed to give him relief, I replaced his nightly bath with a shower. I brought him in with me, much to his delight. He'll dabble his fingers in the spray, point to the blue and green spots on the shower curtain, then he'll tuck his little head under my chin and settle in. We stand there under the warm spray until we turn pruney. It's the perfect excuse to take incredibly long showers twice a day.

Liam enjoyed the shower so much that I've repeated it twice a day for the past three days. I can't help loving it too. Holding that snuggly little body to mine, while it's still little enough to hold. It's quite a sensation. And I get kisses! A little girl at daycare loves to kiss Liam, and he's catching on...slowly. He gets the mouth-to-face thing, but he's yet to learn that kissing involves puckered lips, and not so much a gaping lamprey mouth. Except on very rare occasions, Liam will not give kisses when asked, except I've discovered, when in the shower. Which is fine with me, because it cuts down on the amount of nasal seepage that comes along with the kiss. Hey, it's my kid! It's only gross to you.

Moving on, yesterday morning we had breakfast, and played a bit, and then I stripped him and we took a shower. He wasn't quite as excited as before, and didn't want to play in the spray. He just tucked his head under my chin, his hands under his belly and...hey, wait a second, is he sleeping??

Asleep after two minutes in the shower. While still in the shower. His mouth was closed and he was breathing through his sinuses. Not wanting to interrupt a good thing, I wandered around the shower for twenty minutes or so. When the water started to cool off, I got out, wrapped his towel around him. Bringing him into his bedroom, I laid him down in the crib, naked and damp. I slid a diaper on him, piled a heap of blankets on top of him, and he slept that way for a hour and a half.

Nighttime sleep has become a rare commodity again since Liam's been sick. Now when he wakes in the middle of the night, I have one more strategy to sooth him back to slumber.