What I hate most about fall and winter: the colds and viruses that come home in backpacks and set up camp until the ground thaws. With three kids, there is a never-ending supply of sniffles, runny noses and fevers during the winter. My kitchen counter looks like a pharmacy; brightly colored bottles of Tylenol and cough syrup, an assortment of CVS prescriptions, three half-used jars of vapor rub, an unreliable ear thermometer and a pile of wadded-up tissues. I cringe at every uncovered cough, race to wipe little noses before the green mess manages to glue strands of curly hair to a flushed cheek. We spend irritable hours at the pediatrician’s office only to be told it’s just a virus, when I know for a fact that tomorrow that eardrum will be swollen like a tomato, requiring yet another office visit and another round of the bubble gum-flavored medicine (which I will have to administer by wrestling the child into a headlock and prying her mouth open with tools from the garage).
Tonight it begins at 2 a.m. with a sleepy whine and the distant squeak of mattress springs as my three-year-old daughter Emerie tosses and turns in her bedroom across the hall. Within minutes the whine has escalated into a loud whimper, and before I can rub the sleep from my eyes, my name is echoing through the quiet house:
“Maaaaammmmmmaaaaaaa!”
This is the third time tonight that I have to rouse myself from my own Nyquil-induced coma to settle the sniffly toddler back to sleep. I trudge into Emerie’s bedroom, where she is wiping her nose on her pajamas and reaching for me.
Need…you, she says between sobs.
I pick her up, throw her filthy pink blanket over my shoulder and drop into the rocking chair next to the bed. She curls her arm around my neck and nestles into my shoulder, tiny mouth propped open and eyes still wet with tears and bad dreams. She smells like drool and coconut shampoo, and I bury my face in her mop of brown curls and breathe deeply. I hate it when my kids are sick, but I absolutely love moments like this—moments when I am the only person in her world that can make things better, moments when something as small as the smell of her hair can make my heart feel full.
Need you, too, I whisper, as we drift off to sleep.
