It's Snot Funny

Critter’s latest teething endeavor is quite unpleasant. He is (of course) miserable, but who wouldn’t be when your body is trying to push a piece of bone through layer after layer of your soft tissue?

Teething comes with a variety of symptoms, and, of course, no two children are exactly alike in their teething experience. Loss of sleep, general grumpiness, explosive messes in diapers, and hair trigger crankiness attacks are just a few. And although Critter is indeed miserable, and has told me on more than one occasion with his red rimmed eyes and little Oooooooo’s and Owowowow’s for periods up to 20 minutes straight, it is none of the above listed symptoms I wish to dedicate this blog entry to. The symptom I wish to discuss is so bad, so awful, so fowl that it has sent me running for the tension tamer tea at 10:30 on a Monday morning.

Let’s talk snot. Critter’s nose has turned its self into Mt. Vesuvius. Usually when a child has a runny nose, you grab a tissue and wipe. But with Critter’s nose, that seems to be like taking a single two ply square of toilet paper and attempting to mop up an entire gallon of spilled milk. Between the snot and the gallons of drool, I have had to pull out the big guns- the softest most absorbent towel I can find. Let me explain why.

His eruptions begin with a steady bead of snot, flowing from one nostril or the other. And since the eruptions occur frequently, there seems to be no preference to either side. The boy’s nostrils are an equal opportunity eruptor. Before you can blink, things begin to bubble over, and there’s a river of clear ooze coming from the nose. The drool that accompanies the eruption begins to pool up in the volcano’s crater (Critter’s mouth) and escape with record setting speed over the outer ledge with a gushing waterfall of slightly thinner viscosity.

I swear it’s like being drawn into a natural disaster from which you clearly see coming but can not escape. There begins a low gurgle, an undulation of mucus, a deep breath, then, “Aaaaaaaaa-Choo!”

And I become Pompeii.

Yuck.