Get Out of my Face!

My poor baby couldn’t catch a break this morning.

We have a morning routine. I hear her stirring (she sleeps with us), roll over to feed her quickly, then pick her up for some pajama snuggles. After we’re all snuggled out, I change her diaper, since it is usually saturated with pee.

It’s during diaper changing that I have a prime view up her nose. Yes, I admit it: I’m one of those mothers – the kind that hates boogers in her baby’s nose.

I could see a big one, so I got my bulb syringe and got to work. I thought it would be quick, but soon realized the booger was a little too dry to get out without the aid of some saline. My daughter was shaking her head back and forth and waving her arms in an attempt to ward of the “booger sucker,” and she grew more agitated when she saw the saline bottle coming.

I held her head still with one hand and squirted a few drops in each nostril while she yelled. Only a few sucks with the bulb syringe, and the booger was out. Freedom at last!

Or so she thought.

I noticed that she was wheezing. She’s had a cold for over a week, and was prescribed an inhaler because of the whistling, wheezing sound her breathing was making. I knew that she was already sick of me poking around at her face, but I wanted to get things done as quickly as possible so we could get busy playing with toys.

I shook her inhaler and attached it to the contraption the hospital sent home with us. Laying her down on my lap, with her head held stationary between my knees, I put the breathing mask over her face. I pushed down on the inhaler to release the medicine, then waited for her to take 10 breaths.

If only it was as easy as counting to 10. She thrashed, yelled, screamed, kicked, and did everything she could to knock the mask off of her face. If that wasn’t enough, the prescription called for two sprays from the inhaler, so we had to go through the whole ordeal again.

Needless to say, she wasn’t a happy camper.

Don’t worry, though. Five seconds later, I shook a rattle in her face, and she forgot the whole thing. Ah, the beauty in the distractibility of infants.