Cold

My poor little boo has a cold, and I hate that she feels badly, but also about an hour into the morning, I realized, “oh. So I guess the snot is going to free-flow in two steady, unimpeded streams until the cold is over…and…that’ll just be that.”

I have always found it notable that being a person is a terribly messy affair that we take great pains to contain, but you don’t realize how much work we all have learned to do to contain it until you have a baby who doesn’t know how to do any of that. And then you realize how much of it there is to learn, slowly and laboriously, while you live in amongst it meanwhile.

Like, for example, Edith’s favorite food is rice. And I never really thought about the fact that eating rice without rice getting into every cranny of the house is a miraculous feat of coordination, a real ballet. I know this because Edith doesn’t. Without mastery of those tiny micro-skills eating rice is somewhat like popping a giant balloon filled with sand in your living room in front of a leaf blower. So we just live in rice now, and that’s that.

Living with a domesticated animal is also a study in fluids management and the incompatibility of a creature who exists in a state of nature to a suburban environment, but I find having a toddler to be even moreso.