Ears Like a Hawk Pt 3

It is minus ten in Evanston right now. Minus. Ten. Elijah, Grover and Diana are hold up in our house burning my old Star Wars figures for warmth. Chewbacca burns the hottest.

The only real bummer about the cold snap besides the fact that it can kill you, is Eli has acquired a severe case of the snots. Someone turned on the nose faucet and broke off the handle. His goo is everywhere. Ew. I can handle the gross, but the general stuffiness is causing him sleep problems. He can only get a slight whistle of air through his nostrils and when he tries to breathe through his mouth it causes a cavalcade of hacking coughs. At which point Diana and I ask, “Was that a ‘Whoop?’ Is he ‘Whooping?’”

Last night I applied Vick’s Vapo Rub to his bare chest just before I put him to bed. He loved it. Eli rubbed his own chest and giggled creepily. I said, “Don’t be weird.”

Cut to 4:30 am.

“Sniff. Sniff. Cough. Cough. Whaaah!”

I got him out of his crib and saw that he was covered in his own snot and his pajamas were open at the chest from him rubbing his Vick’s chest. I rocked him back to sleep. But not before he wiped his snot all over my left arm.

This morning I woke up at 7 and heard Eli still snoring in the other room. I tip toed downstairs and showered and crept back up to our room. Eli was still miraculously asleep.

I then attempted to dress in the dark, silently. I opted out of wearing my chain mail armor or my silver bells pants. But I remembered it was minus ten degrees outside and I’d need a sweater if I was going to make it through the day without, well, dying.

I opened my closet and found a dry cleaning bag containing a sweater. I silently lifted it out of the bag and then I heard it.

“CRINKLE.”

Those dry cleaner jerks had the gall to put that dry cleaning paper in the sweater. I got to the point where putting the sweater back in the closet would make more noise than just removing the damn paper. So I quickly snatched the paper out.

“CRINKLE. CRINKLE. CRINKLE.”

I turned back to the bed and saw Diana sitting upright with an expression of horror.

“Sniff. Sniff. Cough. Cough. Whaaah!”

I ran out of the house and into the cold where I could die in peace.