“Just prentend you’re scuba diving.”, I told him.
It was 4:00 a.m. Today is his 6th birthday. He has a cold and can’t breathe.
He was sleeping on the floor in our bed room because he was keeping his older brother awake with all of his wheezing and sniffling. And, now for the past hour and half, he had been doing the same for us.
“Ouch”, he would cry out in between various snarks and snorks.
“What is hurting?”, we would ask.
“Nothing. It’s just gross.”
Tell me about it.
It’s not that he can’t breathe. It’s that he can’t breathe through his nose, and he was obsessed, it seems, with checking every 30 seconds whether or not that was really still the case. He had to have gone through two boxes of tissues by now.
“Let it go for crying out loud.”, I’d say, “Quit trying to breathe through your nose. You have a COLD. COLD’s stop a person from breathing through their nose for a couple of days. Pretend you’ve got a scuba mask on and just breathe through your mouth!”
Silence. 2 minutes. 3 minutes. I started to fall back to sleep.
“Dad? Can I blow my nose again now?”
He and Mom (now laughing) went down to sit up and watch TV for awhile. “Yay!”, he said, on the way out the door.
Best birthday ever.
