Travel,Colds & Finger Food

Having arrived back from our trip to Michigan we looked forward to being able to sit outside without worry of the mosquitoes carrying Noah off.  Our hair uncurled in the dry desert heat and we once again thought eighty degrees was cool.  We hoped that Noah would sleep through the night or at least for four solid hours, something he did not do while we were on vacation. For some reason eight month olds do not understand that vacation is a time to recharge your bateries not drain them by staying up from 10PM to 3AM each night.    Our only saving grace was my Father-in-law’s fantastic recliner.  This recliner would garnish a grunt or two from Tim the Toolmoan Taylor,  for heavens sake the thing cradles your head so when you fall asleep it does not flop to the side. It also reclines almost to a horizontal position. This is how I slept most of the week with Noah laying on my chest. Even the thought of getting up and putting him back in his crib would enlist a cry from him. Thinking back I should have put him in the chair and just gone back to bed.

A day or so after we got home Noah came down with his first cold, a day after that I came down with a cold. We figure he got it on the plane since there are always more children on flights back to Salt Lake  than there are on any other flight in the world. There never seem to be  a lot of children leaving they always seem to be coming back. You could only have more children on a plane if that plane were going directly to the Disney Land Airport.  But I digress, there were children on the plane who had colds so we guess that is where he got it. Though the woman at the pharmacy seemed to think you could get a cold from going from an air conditioned house outside into the summer sun.   Erin read up on colds in the book she always reads when she wants to know the best way raise a child, I think it is by the guy with the pointy ears from Star Trek. The book told us to suck the snot out of Noah’s nose, so we got out the turkey baster and gave it a try.  We failed. Not once did we  actually suceeded in getting anything out. There are two reasons why we failed; one was that Noah did not like a turkey baster up his nose and the other is that baby snot has the consistancy of rubber cement. Which would be all well and good if we were doing a craft project and had run out of rubber cement.  Snice the turkey baster did not work I went to the store to find something over priced that would work better.  There I found a battery powered snot sucker with two different tips one for boogers  and one for snot. It also plays music so you can “distract the baby” while you stick a vibrating forgien object up their nose.  The music last long enough for you to get the sucker to the nose and then it stops which gives you percisley three seconds to suck the rubber cement out of the baby’s nose before they get mad.  Noah screams and squirms so much when we do this that if we were to do it in public someone would surely call Social Services.

The cold is slowly going away and that means that since Noah’s holow leg is no longer filled up with snot, his appiete is back and he can fill his leg with food again.  Just when you think you have it all down however Noah mixes it up a little. He has done this with eating by deciding that he would rather feed himself  than have us do it.  So now feeding him takes a good hour or so, not because he gums his food fifty time before he swallows it but reather because he stores it in his cheeks like a chipmunk.  He is fairly sly about the whole matter and since he has chubby cheeks to begin with it is hard to tell when his mouth is full; so we trick him by pretending to feed him yet another piece of food. When the food comes close to his mouth he opens nice and wide and we are able to see how full he is. I think he is getting wise to our trick though so I have ordered x-ray glasses off the internet. I know they work because I had a pair when I was a  kid.