Sharing Sickness with the Bitlet

My Bitlet is sick. It's the first time I have had to nurse a sick child, and after years of horror stories about how horrid it was, I was prepared for the worst. I was ready for the incessant crying, the fretting, the mewling sniffles, the leaky snottiness.

Bring it on.

In my head, when I imagined my child's first illness, I envisioned her picking up some kid form of crud at daycare for which I could silently resent the other infants in the nursery, glaring at each one accusingly, wondering which one dared pass on their cooties to my Precious.

What I wasn't prepared for, however, was the literal sharing of the experience with Bitlet.

I think I made my child sick.

Either that, or she made me sick.

I am not particularly comfortable with the idea that I might be the guilty party who shared my cooties with her, so I am clinging to the idea that we simultaneously developed the crud.

It started innocently enough. A few days ago, I noticed Bitlet coughing a little more frequently than normal. At first, I simply believed that she was clearing her throat of the milk that is the sole staple of her diet right now. It was, I told myself, "no big deal." Then, however, I noticed a slight rattling sound when she breathed. Crud. Still, she wasn't running a fever, and I, too, had been congested a litle. I attributed it to allergies and prayed that my child was not developing an allergy to our pets.

That would be devastating, because there is no doubt in my mind who would win the game of "The Pets or the Bitlet." And, honestly, I had convinced myself that she was allergic to our home or our pets after we asked the daycare workers to keep an eye on her and they advised us that she neither coughed nor sneezed the entire time she was at daycare on Wednesday or Thursday.

Perhaps my baby is allergic to me, I wondered.

By yesterday, however, I had to recognize the full truth about my own malady -- I have a summer cold. I have a summer cold that I am sharing with Bitlet, and it's actually not bad.

I am a wimp when I am sick. I want to be cared for and coddled. I want the Vitamin C and chicken noodle soup brought to me in bed. I want the lights dimmed, and I want peace. I don't adapt well to being sick.

You would think that, being my daughter, the picture above would accurately reflect Bitlet's reaction to her first cold. But no. The picture above was actually taken in the middle of a nasty coughing spell, and she is not even crying. No, actually, this is my daughter with a cold:

She's coughing and congested, and has become intimately familiar with her aspirator, but overall, she is taking it in stride. The infant Tylenol is helping, I think. Still, when she coughs uncontrollably, it hurts me, and I would give anything to make it stop. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned by me from this experience:

My daughter is making me look like the big baby, looking at me as if to say "Suck it up!"

That's about right . . . wonder when her dad will share her sentiment?