Snotters

The baby has had a cold for the past few days. Every morning she has been a mess of snot and tears. She has been so bunged up that she cannot eat and breathe at the same time, a state of affairs that she finds extremely distressing. She has been having a good sneeze too, and her poo has been bright green.

Her poo isn’t supposed to be green, at least not all the time, so we phoned the health visitor. She said that while the baby has a cold she is swallowing some mucus and this will end up in the nappy. It’s nothing to worry about, but phone anytime if we are worried.

So that’s ok. We also got some saline drops to put up the baby’s nose. They are a decongestant. The baby is registered at chemists’, so God bless the NHS, we can get stuff for her for free! I don’t really understand how this works, the health visitor tells us what to get and the chemist just dishes it out. We don’t have to produce a bit of paper or anything. Who keeps a lid on it, I wonder? Could we just go in and say the baby needs blackcurrant Strepsils, diazepam and some vallies?

Maybe that would raise some eyebrows. Other cold-fighting news is that I have been picking the baby’s nose. I have two methods for excavating her nasal cavity One is to lightly pinch the baby’s nose between my thumb and fore finger until a bogey appears that I can roll into a little grey-green ball and flick in the bin. The danger with this method is that the baby doesn’t understand what I am doing and keeps trying to suck my fingers. The other method is to insert a damp cotton bud into the nose in the hope that the bogey will adhere to the end of it. Bizarrely, the baby loves this and giggles throughout the procedure. At least she holds still.