Friday, January 24, 2014

Snot Camp

Daddy throwing a pot of boiling water into the frigid air to demonstrate how it turns into snow and vapor.  Only this is before the water has left the pot.  But you can see his puffy Man Camp parka.

You're still sick, poor sweet boy, and we've been living in the land of your snot for the past few days.  Thin, watery snot, thick green snot, snot laced with threads of blood, saline-crusted snot on your cheeks, hard brown boogers gumming up the insides of your nostrils.  We've been using the Nose Freda (a device with a tube to literally suck the snot directly out of you--no, the snot does not get in the suck-er's mouth) and of course cloths and Kleenexes and wipes.  The worst is when you're too clogged up to nurse so you take a few gulps and then release the nipple, panting and gasping, before trying again.  Your fever comes and goes.  When it seems to make you miserable, we've offered Tylenol, but--though you still smile and fiddle with objects--you look wan and watery-eyed and off kilter even with the medicine in your system.

Grandma Dot came for a visit yesterday.  She walked and bounced you while I worked at Blue Monday and then she did Ariel puzzles and played Legos with Thisbe.  We ate soup with ground turkey and tomatoes and kale, dense multi-grain bread with brie, baby carrots, and tangelos for dinner.  Heart-shaped chocolates and pistachios and cocktails after the kiddos went to bed.


This morning Daddy left for Man Camp.  Well, I think he left.  We dropped him in the parking lot of the Quarterback Club; half an hour later, when we drove by again, he was still standing there.  Daddy and twenty other men, big puffy jackets, hiking boots with laces untied, skis like piles of kindling.  All of them standing around, drinking coffee from chrome-bright insulated mugs.  They are all supposed to be on a bus headed north.  They are supposed to ski or snowshoe with mammoth packs on their backs to cabins with very few amenities.  Where they will bond?  Or sing invented, drunken verses to Kum-Ba-Ya? Or where the combined scent of their body odor will form a mythic and terrifying beast?

Your father has been working his butt off.  First his book manuscript, now J-term.  Almost every night he spends at least two hours on further grading or prepping after you and your sister have gone to bed.  So he really deserves this weekend.  Deserves to get away from papers and thinking and sinks filled with dirty dishes and snotty noses and student e-mails and relatives and familial meltdowns.  He deserves to get to burrow into a sleeping bag for as long as he likes in the morning, to pump frigid air through this chest, to slice clean tracks into the snow and to hum Aquavit down his throat late into the night.  But I'd be a big fat liar if I didn't also mention how his departure is tainted with just a little bit of jealousy.  Or, a lot.  Given how often you're still nursing, I couldn't leave you for 48 hours right now, and even if we could work it out somehow I wouldn't really feel comfortable doing so.  Still, it's hard to see him go off like some sort of untethered individual.  Someone who can hover through the next two days thinking only of his own needs.  Whose fleece, while likely reeking of sweat, will be free of baby snot.  Who will get to have uninterrupted conversation after uninterrupted conversation.

I'm glad for your father.  He needs this and deserves it.  But deep inside the yawning maw of January, I need 48 hours to be an untethered individual too.

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