Nose Woes

Somewhere the nose gods are content. And somewhere, shareholders of the Kleenex™ Company are smiling. The torch, or in this case, the tissue, has been passed from mother to son. You see, my daughter, like me, is literally a snot-nosed kid.

In Finley’s short little life she has learned a few things; she’s learned how to roll. She’s learned how to grab and hold toys. And she’s learned how to turn her head from side to side in defiance when the snot rag goes for the face. She’s a tiny, smiling ball of mucus producing joy and she’s just like her old man.

You see, most of my early memories consist of a hand with a Kleenex™ in it, thrusting toward my nose. My mom or sisters would chase me down and rub my honker raw. I absolutely hated it. As I got older I learned to give in and blow into the tissue, or as it turned out, several hundreds of thousands of tissues. This was the late ‘60s and early ‘70s… BEFORE the “aloe-infused” or “soft” days. This was one-grade above T.P. and one-grade below the paper towel stuff. My nose was so red, I looked more like Rudolph than Randall. And now there’s a certain little girl with a runny nose and a certain dad with tissue in hand. We haven’t graduated to having to chase her down, just yet.

Heather is convinced it’s just a sniffle. That it’s a small cold all kids get when they go to daycare. In fact, we read somewhere that in the first year of daycare, most kids get twelve colds and the parents end up with six. Two weeks ago, Heather got her first and I wound up with it last week. Oh, the joys of daycare!

Of course Finley has been the carrier in our family. All those little ones, crawling around, chewing on toys and each other… If Heather had her way, she’d send Finley to school in a space suit. But, reality says that exposing her to germs at this age will actually help her develop a tolerance and keep her from being really sick, later. We’ll let you know how that goes. Meanwhile, mom sterilizes every toy, article of clothing and exposed skin that Finley brings home.

But none of that can help the fact that our little princess has the sniffs and the snorts, especially at night. She gets so clogged up that we have to give her saline nose drops, which she hates. And as I watch her struggle against the drops and the wipes, I can only tell her how much I feel for her. Daddy has been there and, unfortunately, still visits the land of sniffles a little too often. And although Heather is probably right and Finley may just have a cold, I have a feeling I’ve passed on “The Curse of the Schnoz.”

I’m not sure if I desecrated some nose-honoring temple in a past life, but I have paid the price with my nasal and sinus passages since the beginning. I had my adenoids removed with my tonsils only to see the adenoids grow back. I’ve had my sinuses nearly explode on long plane flights. I’ve even had surgery where they drilled to make my nasal passages bigger. So, now I feel a little pang of guilt when I have to wipe that little girl’s nozzle.

I want to tell her that her nose isn’t angry with her. I want to tell her that it’s just the body’s way of getting all the bad stuff out of her nostrils. And, I want to tell her that it will all go away. But daddy nose better. Daddy remembers going to get his tonsils out when he was little and winding up staying in the hospital for a few days because he stopped breathing during the operation. Daddy remembers getting the nose drilling and having the equivalent of a pair of rubber gloves stuffed with gauze jammed up his beak.

Of course, she’s only six-and-a-half months old, so she may not have actually developed daddy’s nose problems(Well, at least I’m hoping). So, I won’t pass along my sniffer stories quite yet. But, if those cranky nose gods decide to bestow daddy’s curse upon her, you have to believe that the best person to go to for a wipe will be me. I will have the gentlest of hands with the softest tissue out there. But more importantly, I will sympathize with her. Because daddy knows.