Neighborhood-Kids All Local. All for Kids. All the Time.

Lately I've taken to hosing the kid down after a messy diaper rather than using countless wipes.  This means that sometimes Archer has two or three baths in a single day.  He, of course, thinks this is reason to celebrate, and is probably developing a warped sense that bathtime is all the time. 

Matter of fact, when we are out and about, without access to a shower nozzle, he gets this disgruntled look on his face when I'm wiping away at his bottom, like, "What's this nonsense?  Where's the dignity?"

I was walking through Cornwall Park today with Archer in the carrier on my chest.  At one point I noticed he crossed his legs and strained ever so slightly.  Next thing I knew, golden streaks of diarrhea ran down his legs, out his pant cuffs, over his socks and shoes and onto my thighs.  Before I knew what hit me, I had poop on my left wrist and index finger. 

After much wrangling and oh-dear-gods, I got him sorta cleaned up and in the carseat, drove home, walked up the front steps and just before the threshold - he puked. 

He's still sick. 

On our way home from Mexico, Archer and I were enjoying our tight little capsule of space on the airplane when he experienced an abrupt shift in attitude.  Until this point, he was the very essence of politeness and good humor; flirting with other passengers, sitting patiently on my lap, playing coy games of peek-a-boo with surly teenagers in the rows behind us.  But he had finally snapped, determined to fulfill the crabby-baby-on-long-flight-from-hell stereotype once and for all.  I had been nursing him intermittently, achieving the desired effect of calming him and helping him to doze, but we were approaching the fifth hour of containment, and I felt I had to pull out the secret weapon: a big ol' bottle of formula.

I reached blindly into the bag at my feet while he squirmed and whined, straining to find the tall glass bottle with the pre-measured amount of magic powder.  When I finally clutched it and brought it into Archer's field of vision, he went nuts.  As I beckoned the flight attendant for some water to mix it up, he began straining and clawing at it as if it were the holy grail.  This desperate clambering continued until I got the water and began to shake the bottle.  Simultaneously he lunged, jaws open. 

Tooth met glass with a mighty clink, and Archer's mouth spread wide in a bloody, silent sob.

Fortunately the bleeding stopped immediately, as did the crying when Archer got his lips around the bottle's nipple.  When he finished the formula and was contented again, I stuck a finger in his maw to assess the damage.  Sure enough, a chunk had chipped out of his top left tooth. 

I'd love to report that the woes ended there.  After all, it was a tiny little chip in his baby tooth.  But no.  This story ends with me nursing him a few hours later and discovering that this little snaggle tooth had become a demented torture device, acting as a chard of broken glass that would eventually bore a hole in my nipple that would in turn become infected and cause intense burning pain.  

This incident gets categorized under plain old wierd stuff that happens to moms I guess.  I ended up filing the tooth down with an emory board and pumping until the nipple wound healed.  Crazy. 

My friend's neighbor is this mawkish fellow who slumps out onto his porch to retrieve the paper each day, always coughing, snuffling or groaning meekly.  When my friend offers up a word of greeting or concern, he stares at her sleepily. 

"Ron.  How you doing?  You don't look so good."

"No, I been better.  I got The Sick."

The Sick.  That always struck me as the perfect phrase.  You know, that certain breed of illness that seems to come from nowhere, hangs around too long, has no cure, and just feels gunky, crappy, icky.  The Sick.

My son has The Sick.

The day after Christmas, my husband and I brought little Archie into bed with us, he nursed contentedly, sat up, and barfed.  And barfed.  

That was the beginning of a long descent into a hellish quagmire of vomiting, diarrhea, fever, rattling chest, messy nose and a hacking cough.

It's worth mentioning that we went to Mexico for a week during all of this.

We are approaching day 17 of The Sick, and I thought that when I took him to the doc a few days ago that we were in the clear; he hadn't had a fever, diarrhea or vomiting in over a week.  But yesterday it all started up again, like a boorish guest who refuses to leave the dinner party and sticks around drinking all of your best liquor.

To his credit, the boy has been a real trooper through all of this.  Aside from a ratched-up level of clingyness, he has smiled and babbled on through the worst of it.  He'll puke and then immediately grin and squeak with joy.  And when he blows out his diaper, he lays there cheerily as I frantically mop up the morbid stench from his skin and surrounding area.  Even when he sounds like he might actually cough up a pudding pack, he flaps his arms and crawls around without a care in the world.  If only we could all be so happily ill.

So we're back to the doc today.  The on-call guy at Madrona Medical will be the third pediatrician to assess The Sick for poor Archer.  Here's hoping this dinner guest finally has the good sense to call it a night.

Before Archie was sick, I was chatting with a friend at a Christmas party.  She has a daughter (her first) who is one day older than Archie.  I asked her if she really felt like a mother yet, at almost ten months in.  She said she felt the most like a mother when Aya got sick for the first time; wanting desperately to make everything better for her child, needing the hurt to go away, feeling absolutely driven to give the best care possible. 

Two days later Archie got The Sick.  And I'm a mom.

My son loves kissing.  French kissing.  With tongue.  And saliva. 

Endearing as this may be for his dad and me, sometimes I wonder if it is creepy that we enjoy it so much.  All this unabashed making out with our infant.  Letting him lick our cheeks and lips in delight.  We can't help laughing when we request a kiss and he comes at us like a drunken frat boy with his mouth stretched wide.

And where to draw the line?  When we were recently visiting his grandparents in Seattle, Archer was begging for a open-mouth kiss from his Grandpa who, getting swept up in the excitement of it all, went at him with his own tongue out.  I pulled the boy back at the last second, saying, "Okay, I think that's crossing the line..."  We teased the poor old guy for the rest of the night for initiating a make out session with his own grandson.

But who can blame him.  Rarely in our lives do we get such appealing offers to swap spit.

Certainly, if bodily functions make you queasy, you should not read this entry.  And you should think seriously about not having kids.  If you do have kids, you must really suffer because kids spew forth such a variable torrent of excrement that to alternately laugh and shake your head in disbelief seems the only reasonable way to cope.

Now, if you think that stories about bodily functions are in poor taste, again, you should not read this entry.  I'm hear to admit that I enjoy -- nay, revel -- in bodily function stories and hereby forewarn that this blog will undoubtedly contain the occasional good-god-you'll-never-believe-what-the-boy-puked-up-today and other gross out stories.  What can I say; I have to live through it (and clean it up), so sharing and laughing about it seems a sensible if not harmless way to deal.

All disclaimers aside, here's what happened:  Archer shat his bed.  First time.  Okay, maybe his diaper has leaked a tiny bit onto the sheet before, but never has he pooped so mightily (shall we call it a pile?) directly on his sleeping area.  And that's not what makes this a story worth telling; it's that he was awake when he did it, tracked it all around his mattress (in an attempt to flee?) and finally ended up crashing out with a clearly defined "shit trail" leading away from his slumbering body.  Did I mention he was sucking his thumb (read - poop in mouth)?  

Upon opening the door to his bedroom, I staggered at the warm wall of odor; the thermostat was set too high and the fumes were almost visably evaporating into the hot, stagnant air.  When I looked to Archer's bed, I saw an abstract brown mural fanning out from the epicenter, with the artist sleeping placidly on the fringe of the canvas.  I let out a breathy "Oh god" and immediately tip-toed over to inspect his hands and face for traces of the offending orange-brown paint.  I sighed with relief when I saw that for all of his apparent romping through feces, he had none in or around his mouth.  Sleep on, little baby.