Bite Me...And Everything Else As Well!

My younger son is teething. He drools on everything during the day, and at night when that maddening itchy-ouch starts gnawing at his poor mandibles, his sharp cries wake us in the night.

We have given him paracetamol, cold wet towels and teething rings. We have rubbed his gums with chilled xylitol gel and waltzed him around the apartment in the dead of the night singing “Moon River” while he whimpers and grinds his gums against our shoulder blades.

And in the mornings we stagger groggily downstairs, Woog with his eyes still encrusted and his brows bunched in protest. Eli meanwhile gurgles cheerfully at our zombie-selves (Good morning, my family! Isn’t this a wonderful day?), runners of saliva flowing from his grinning mouth and glistening on his chin.

I try to assure myself this is temporary, even as he bites down hard on my nipple and pulls it out like taffy (and I try not to cry out too loudly lest he choke on his meal in terror). Surely that tooth will rear its milky head soon, and we shall all dance with joy – yehey, one out, thirty more to go!

We are lucky this time, though. Woog, when he was teething, had the sniffles, a wheezing flu, a temperature hovering at 40 degrees (104 degrees farenheit), and a stint of barfing and wet bowels that ended with him being attached, screaming, to an intravenous drip. Of course we were younger then, and had the energy to stand sentry for two nights straight while he screeched, struggled to dislodge the needle, vomited and shitted his way to recovery. Eli’s suffering, and consequently ours, is trivial in comparison.

(Papa God, You are just indeed!)

And with that in perspective, we shall hunker down and grit our remaining teeth while our son sets out to grow his.