Getting over it.

The last few weeks, I've gotten away from the writing and have simply been posting videos and photos of Brice with little status updates. Its cute and all, but today it just seems like it ain't enough. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I haven't slept in like 5 days (no joke). Perhaps it has to do with the doom and gloom that fills the news broadcasts, clutters my inbox, kicks off every meeting. Perhaps it is because even though my husband says he's close to getting his work done, I know that it is never really "finished." Whatever it is, I need to write. It always makes me feel better.

Brice has been sick for the last week and yes, I'm going to say it here, I totally blame my mother-in-law. I love Elaine and she knows it (I hope) but I'm going to start calling her Typhoid Mary. Typhoid has the unique ability to not know that she is sick until she has infected everyone in a 25 mile radius. Typhoid came to visit and now Brice has a cold - the kind of cold that fills his nose with a thick concrete-like substance and gives him a hacking cough that seriously sounds like he's been polishing off two packs a day and a fifth of bourbon. Three trips to the doctor now and no relief... for any of us.

Joel is sick now too and last night at around 9pm, he proclaimed that he was going to put himself into a NyQuil induced coma and go to bed... upstairs. So I stay downstairs with Brice because even though there's really nothing that I can do to end the nasal drip or end the cough, its a mother's right to try (and quite frankly, Joel's coughing and sneezing isn't really turning me on enough to go into the sick ward that is now our upstairs bedroom).

Brice sleeps for a bit and wakes up at midnight starving. He finishes 6 ounces with a ferocity that is as if he has not seen food in 3 days (when in reality, its only been 3 hours). He coughs for about half an hour and finally passes out on the pillow next to me. Hands over his head in the "stick em up" pose that he's so famous for. He wakes again at 3:00am. Another bottle, another wave of coughing, I use the electric nose-sucker that Joel bought in an attempt to clear him out. This leads to hysteria. Now he's coughing and crying and is so red in the face he could probably gain entrance to the Kennedy compound. And now he is totally awake. I watch the hours tick by... 4am he's playing peek-a-boo with the comforter. 5am he's showing off how he can take his binky out of his mouth with one hand while simultaneously slapping my cheek with the other. 6am the sun is coming up and he's yawning but nowhere even close to sleeping. Sigh. By 6:30 we roll out of bed and head upstairs. Joel looks terrible and he's jumping in the shower because he's got to get to work early. I barely even recall saying goodbye to him.

Brice and I lay in bed and watch and news for a bit until its about 7am. He plays with the remote, I check my blackberry. I take him in the bathroom and sit him in his jiggly chair while I shower. I sing to him while I shower to keep him entertained... this morning the playlist consists of some David Grey, All American Rejects, Jason Mraz and Brice's favorite, Somewhere Over The Rainbow. I can sing this song to him 500 times in a row and he'll always be smiling.

And I laugh. I laugh because I am so exhausted and so overwhelmed and so angry and am even a little bit lonely considering I've spent the majority of the last 24 hours having a one-sided conversation with a sick baby. But this is what its really like to be a parent...the kind of stuff that doesn't make it into those Baby Whisperer books. And my child, despite his illness, has a smile ear to ear because in his mind, I've got the voice of an angel. I brush off the exhaustion and get over it. And even now as I write it all down, it doesn't seem that bad in hindsight.

I gotta say it, writing for me will always be the best therapy. Whew.