No, it’s not a vampire story.* Get it? We’re talking about pacifiers, binkies? (well at least that’s what we used to call them) Babies suck on them? All right, probably not the best of jokes, but it was all that spoke to me when it was time for the headline. What brought this up was that my oldest little dude has a cold and that reminded me of when he was a little, little dude. He was about six months old when he got the worst cold of his little life.
My oldest little dude had been prone to getting FUO’s for most of his life. That stands, of course, for fevers of unknown origin. That means he would suddenly, and for no reason we could determine, get a fever of 104 degrees and stay that way for a couple of days. Bad enough. But when you couple that fever with a stuffy nose, well that’s cause to start looking over that deal the devil dropped by a couple of weeks ago. I mean, eternal damnation doesn’t look that bad when you’re staring a screaming little dude in the face at 3 a.m. for the third night in a row.
My oldest, and then only, little dude was so stuffed up he couldn’t get any relief from anything. We’d give him his binky to pacify him, and he’d be so stuffed up he could only suck on the thing for a half a minute or so before he started to pass out from oxygen deprivation, then he’d spit out the binky and resume auditioning for the screeching choir. Eventually, I and my wife, known to some as She Who Says Get Your @$$ In Gear, decided to try and get him to sleep in his car seat. We strapped him in the car seat, basically upright, and then I’d drive off into the dark, dark night. Not the Dark Knight, that’s something else entirely.
I’d drive the little dude around for hours, gradually losing all touch with reality. Still, it wasn’t all bad. I mean, how often do you see unicorns running alongside your car when you’re not terminally short of sleep? Eventually, the little dude would fall asleep and start snoring worse than his mom, and, brother, believe me when I tell you that is very, very loud. Our little dude’s cold was so bad for so long that he eventually gave up his binky by himself because he couldn’t suck on it and keep breathing. We got lucky that time.
Of course, that’s not to say we kept getting lucky. Especially when our second little dude came around. More on that tomorrow.
– Richard
*That was for all the Christopher Moore fans out there. Right, Dad?
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