Illin'

It’s a good thing you can’t hear me talking right now. I sound like I have a hollowed out tin can attached to my face. W gave me the mother of all colds and it’s rocking my world. I clear my throat every 5 seconds, cough every four and sniff every three. Don’t you wish you were my officemate? Like I told a girlfriend last Friday night, I fanaticize about digging the baby bottle brush out of storage and sticking it down my throat to relieve the endless itching. Oh, and my face is as puffy as a cadavers. Nice, no? I’m sure W is suffering from the same symptoms but can’t verbalize them specifically. We cough, sneeze and sniffle together. It’s the pits. I just hope we don’t trade this thing back and forth like a game of Go Fish. It would be good to be well so that we don’t make Santa sick, too.

Lately, it’s been hard keeping W out of the toilet bowels. He slinks off to the loo and soon after you hear the bathroom door clicking closed. He has to do his dirty work in complete privacy. He goes in with serious determination and resurfaces like Jacque Cousteau after a successful dive. Most times, he’s armed with the bowel brush and scrapes the insides and outsides clean, others, he just goes in head first. You catch him in the act and he doesn’t recoil in fear or shame or disgust. He grins at you like he has just won the Olympic medal in synchronized swimming and this makes it very hard to discipline him without wanting to hug him for being so damn cute.

W is still the proud owner of only four teeth. At fifteen months, he still looks like a chipmunk but one that resembles David Letterman more and more as the weeks go by. The absence of other anchoring teeth is causing the two top ones to drift apart. He’s a masculine Madonna or a real life pint-sized Alfred E. Newman. I just hope the mystery of the missing teeth is soon solved. He would really like to sink his teeth into some holiday Angus.