Excuse the brevity and scattered nature of what you’re about to read. It’s late/early. The sun has not yet come up.  These are the moments I must salvage to be creative – I’m up editing a documentary and planning for the website and my plan was to also edit the three (count them: 3) new baby blogs that were all unfinished because the baby has been sick.

This being our first baby and our first sickness we work in our strengths. My wife does everything and l look worried and ask what can I do.

Since I don’t have the body full of milk and the hairier face I am the legs of the family. The “could you get me the…”  guy  I’m also the “oh and don’t forget the…” guy and more often the  “did you remember to…” dude.

Things they don’t tell you #4080: babies don’t know how to blow their nose and (for the most part) don’t breathe out of their mouths. Which means it drips, occasionally blows bubbles, or they swallow it and it accumulates in their stomach till  then like your 4th grade volcano science project they erupt.

In the parenting game, I’m more the ‘blood man’ than the ‘bodily fluids dude.’ Cuts, scrapes, bruises, other assorted everyday gore, I’m your man. But from a very young age I have been a germophobe. Borderline obsessive. I remember being mad if anyone tasted my ice cream or if I had to share a cup of juice. It’s probably what kept me from being as promiscuous as my fellow classmates in college… I remember how thoroughly horrified I was in jr high school of all the films where they show you syphilis or gonorrhea.

But I digress. My point is, I’m skittish about germs.

So you can imagine my horror this holiday season when I brought my child among friends and family for their first viewing and he was passed around like a party joint.
Yuk party joints
Think about a party blunt for a minute.  Someone you don’t know takes what usually looks like a dirty nails, splits open a cigar, fills it with greenery and proceeds to lick it closed. The grossness is probably a big reason why I never smoked. I’m saying: if that same person prepared an eggroll like that you probably wouldn’t eat it.

My point is, here is my beautiful pure healthy baby, kissed on, squeezed, sticking his hands in various people’s mouths, dripping drool of all lengths and thickness. All I could see were heat signatures and medical stats like the POV of the cyborg in the movie Terminator.

For the first time since he’s been here it dawned on me that this is only the beginning. He is going to walk in mud, touch dead birds, play outside in filth with his filthy friends with their filthy parents that all go to the same filthy indoor germ filled school. His life will be spent as a host of a germ brunch.

I remember one of my cousins telling me upon his birth, “Wait till you have to suck the snot out of his nose.”

I immediately imagined myself in jail for having let a child suffocate on his own snot.

My first day in the yard (that’s what they call the play ground in prison) and some guy with arms as big as my legs asks me what I’m in for. Slow pan upward. The sun is blocked out by his height. A murmuring, hostile crowd forms around me and they begin to chant. “Booger Bennu” they’d call me and after the years pass, I’d have tattoo-tear-boogers on my lip…

But I digress. My point is, the only reason I would ever actually do that nasty deed is because I imagine jail has even more germs than a baby’s snot…well that and rape and white bread. Yuck!

I usually like to have a snappy ending to these but there is none.

Most of my imagination is spent being a terrified first time father using my imagination to think of what could be and comparing horror stories
Like one of our friends had to hold their son down while they put in a catheter. I guess you don’t know what your made of till you have to deal with something like that. I personally don’t want know what I’m made of.

Our child’s pediatrician says its not an issue till there’s a fever so
I chant, “No fever” into his hair over and over in increasingly softer tones till its just my mouth moving then silence.
Then I trust the silence.

As long as there is no fever he’s the good kind of sick – no hospital, no oxygen mask, no catheter, just good old fashioned snot.

What helps is that even through his pain he seems to find an occasional smile.

Well that’s it. My guilt about doing anything but hovering over my wife and child will only allow me to write this much so don’t be mad if I stop writing in the middle of a sentence to go chec