Love is:

• Letting your daughter vomit all over you while actually holding out your palm and encouraging her to PUT IT THERE.
• Calling the emergency doctor back two times because you are so afraid of overdosing her on the Motrin he told you to give her AGAIN.
• Holding her roasting body and stroking her flushed cheeks for two and a half hours, wishing on every snowflake that the 104-degree fever would just break.
• Sleeping with her on the couch for the rest of the night, waking every hour on the hour to feel her forehead and remember that you forgot to change your vomitous shirt.
• Not caring about any of it when she wakes up alive.

Dec. 5, 9 p.m.

Beloved:  "Are you feeling any better?"

Me:  "Not really.  My throat still hurts quite a bit."

Beloved:  "It seems like you get sick a lot."

Me:  "Well, the little angel did cough in my face quite a bit this weekend.  Maybe I have more face-to-face contact with her than you do.  Anyway, you don't understand because you never get sick."

Beloved:  "You're right."  (Notice there is no sympathy from beloved anywhere in this conversation.)

Dec. 6, 7 p.m.

Beloved:  "I'm dying.  My head hurts.  My back hurts.  It's so cold in here. Why is it so cold?"  Puts on stocking hat inside house and curls up to the space heater while I attend to the drippy little angel's needs.

Me:  "One will watch one's mouth when one declares that one's wife must be hung-over following Santa Pub Crawl and couldn't possibly actually be sick."

Beloved:  "Oh, God, take me now."

Me:  "Thank goodness YOU didn't have to go to Union Station when you felt like this, hmm?"

Beloved:  "Just give me a gun.  I'm going to put myself out of my misery."

Me:  "Oh, for God's sake. I'll make you some soup."

Dec. 7, 4 a.m.

Little Angel:  Bark, bark, bark. 

Is there a seal in the little angel's room?  I haul myself from bed and check on her.  She's lying in a pool of snot, too tired to move, wracked by coughing.  I pick her up and administer the Benadryl, the OTC cough medicine.  We go downstairs to the couch.

Me:  "The ouchies and coughs will go away now.  Go to sleepy."

LA:  "Mil?"

Me:  "It's a little early for milk now. Let's just sleepy."

LA:  "Mil?  Mil?  Tank two.  TANK TWO.  MIL."

I get her milk. 

LA:  (pointing outside) "Lights!"

Me:  "This is no time for conversation.  Please go to sleepy. Mama is tired."

Dec. 7, 8 a.m. (walk-in pediatrician's office)

Beloved:  "Oh, my aching back."

Me:  "Why did you come with me? I told you to stay in bed if you're going to be sick today."

Beloved:  "I didn't want you to think I'm not helping."

Me:  "Oh, my God. Now I've heard it all."

Doctor:  "Here's some narcotic cough syrup.  Make sure she doesn't operate any heavy machinery while she's taking it."

Me:  "Oh, my God."

Collect drippy angel and whining husband.  Drop off angel at daycare and promise to come back at naptime with cough syrup.  Drop off husband on couch and promise to come back at lunch with soup and orange juice.  Go to work and think about own sore throat.  Thank God men don't have babies.

On Sunday, I decided to do Pilates at home.  My beloved agreed to watch the little angel so she wouldn't kill herself while I was preoccupied. Of course, to him this means trying to read the paper the entire day while I watch the little angel instead, growing more and more agitated with every thump I hear as he moves toward her guided by hearing alone, unable to rip his eyes from the sports section.

I have a bad cold (wah), and I thought a little exercise and stretching might make at least the body aches feel better.  I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but it has worked for me before.   

The first part of the tape was "core conditioning."  This involves laying down on the floor and moving your legs around while keeping your torso flat.  It's pretty painful, but wickedly effective.  So I laid down on the floor, raised my feet, turned them out, and started pumping my arms vigorously in a move called "the hundred."  All of the sudden, I heard my beloved laughing.  I looked over, and there was the little angel, feet in the air, rocking back and forth as she tried to pump her arms, whoosh-whooshing with her mouth as she went along.

I think she's ready for ballet.

Well, Santa Pub Crawl 2005 was a resounding success.  Such a success, in fact, that it made me sick.  Yes, I am so lame that I can't handle one late night of frivolity without getting a sore throat and nasty cold.  Wah.  Whoa is me.

We rolled in after closing down (well, we made it to last call, anyway) Bobby Baker's bar.  It was about two by the time we went to sleep.  At 4:30, the little angel started crying. She cried for about twenty minutes before I threw Ferber to the wind and begged my visiting mother to take her downstairs and MAKE THE NOISES STOP.  I drug myself from my Bed of Despair around 8:30 in the morning, head throbbing, voice scratchy, throat hurting, slightly nauseated.  I guess that is what three glass of wine, one shot and a Smirnoff Ice will do to you when you are not used to staying up past 10 p.m.

I was dragging hard all day Saturday and even had to duck out of a holiday party we'd been planning to go to for weeks.  I fell asleep on the couch watching a show about construction with my dad and beloved.  My beloved finally woke me up at 10:30 (I'd been sleeping for at least an hour) and made me go to bed.  Sunday the sore throat was worse and today I am officially going to whine to the Internet and anyone who will listen to me about it.

The little angel is also sick.  She is cough, cough, coughing.  She actually coughed until she spit up on me this morning as we were lying on the couch. I didn't notice (it wasn't very much) until the tangy scent of milk vomit tickled my nostrils.  Ew.  But I was too tired and body-aching sore to get up and do anything about it, so we lay there for a while in our own gore watching Little Einsteins.  Then the little angel saw the cat and started shouting "Sybie! Sybie!" so we had to get up and love on Sybil on the way upstairs to get dressed.  She is able to be cheerful amid her illnesses, while her mother is much more dramatic.  Thank goodness she did not inherit this part of my personality.

Wah, sniff. 

Last night, the little angel was not into going to bed.  My beloved was at a basketball game, so I decided to let her cry for a little while. I could hear the exhaustion in her voice and knew from the frequent eye-rubbing that she was genuinely tired.

After about fifteen minutes, the neighbor's car alarm went off.  The little angel's cries took on a fever pitch.  Now, there's a difference between letting her cry herself to sleep and letting her undergo genuine terror, so I went upstairs to reassure her everything was okay.  As I opened the door, I saw her standing in her crib spewing white chunks all over the floor, her sheet and her pajamas.  Thank goodness she had already thrown Tad the Singing Frog and Gray Kitty clear.  The Bunny Slippers were also spared the wreckage.

I pulled her from the crib.  "It's okay, honey," I said, holding her out at arm's length (difficult, since I think my recurrent repetitive stress injury had actually pulled a muscle last night - it's still quite painful on the day I'm SUPPOSED to get my long-awaited massage, dammit).  "It's just a car.  It's just a car."  I put her on the floor to try to ascertain what to clean up first.  The vomit made a little puddle on the sheet and was dripping from the crib rails to the floor.

She followed me around the house as I gathered cleaning supplies, still sputtering. "Jess a cah," she said.  "Jess a cah."

I pulled the sheets from her bed.  She reached out to touch the vomit on the crib rail.  "No, no," I said.  "Yucky."

"Yucky.  Jess a cah."

We cleaned up the floor - it's currently undergoing Resolve Therapy, but just then, there was no way I was going to subject her to the hated vacuum cleaner.  I changed her diaper and her pajamas, wiped the snot, tears and vomit from her chin.  Her blue eyes shone with love.  "Jess a cah," she said solemnly.

"Yes," I said.  "A car.  Vroom, vroom.  Not bad.  Not scary."  Well, not until she gets her license, anyway.

I put her back in her clean bed.  She laid down obediently.  "Sleepy," I said, and turned on the thankfully unscathed Tad.  By the time he'd gone through six minutes till night-night, she was out.

I went downstairs to throw the stinky mess in the laundry, pondering if I'd done something wrong.  I'm not a mean person.  I don't mean to let my child cry until she pukes.  This is the second time this has happened. The first time I was also letting her cry herself to sleep when the Ghetto Bird went over.  This seems to only happen when she's already upset and then hears a scary, unidentified noise.

I called my parents.  "The little angel cried until she puked again," I said.

My mother sighed.  "It's okay, honey.  You didn't do anything wrong."

"Do you think she'll live?" I asked.  I am not a dramatic person AT ALL.

"Yes," Ma said.  "Do you want to talk to your father?"  This is an avoidance technique, but I accepted it.  I felt oddly calm.  I do know that she's going to live.  Actually, I was really just glad it was all over and I might still get to drink my wine and watch a movie.

My father came on the line.  "I think she'll be fine," he said.  "We'll be there tomorrow."  My parents are coming in tonight to watch the little angel while my beloved and I host the fourth annual Santa Pub Crawl.  He dressed up like Santa so we can make asses of ourselves in our own neighborhood with our friends and whatever stragglers we can pick up along the way.

"Okay," I said.  "That's all I had."

"Good night, honey," they said.

I sat back, drinking my wine, and thought of the memory I have of crying myself to sleep.  There's only one, and I have no idea how old I was, except that I remember my bed being against the east wall of my bedroom, which I don't think actually happened until I was a little older.  I do remember the night, though. I cried and cried - probably for a very long time - the little angel comes by her extreme emotional outbursts honestly - and then finally realized that nobody was going to come.  I remember screaming a little harder upon this realization, then deciding since it wasn't working that I would just go to sleep.  This memory is helpful when I'm letting the angel cry. 

I've read literally hundreds of entries on various parenting message boards from parents who are not willing to let their children cry for more than ten minutes.  We've been known to let the angel cry for hours in our quest for sleep.  We're not mean - we love her very much - but we do know that it's a hard world out there for kids who can't learn to depend on themselves.  She's cried a hundred times when we left her at daycare or with a sitter, and she doesn't cry anymore.  She willingly runs off to play with her friends, wielding her banana, when I drop her off now. This morning she didn't even look back when she ran into the room. 

I do want to give her the gift of self-reliance.  Letting her cry herself to sleep may seem harsh - especially when vomit is involved - but I believe she does know that we would never let her honestly suffer if something is very wrong or she is very terrified.  I think she's also starting to learn that in the battle of wills, we're equally matched.

She slept all night long until 7 a.m.  That's the longest she's slept in probably a year.  At this point, I've stopped thinking I can understand her patterns.  I'm just happy I got to sleep so long.

Now I've just got to figure out how to fix my back.

Tomorrow I'm taking the day off to go Christmas shopping.  Every year I say I am going to do this, but this is the first time I actually have.  I HATE shopping.  The problem is that I'm really cheap. 

There have been a few times in my life when I had enough money to spend a few hundred bucks freely without worrying it was going to mean forgoing dinners out for a few weeks.  In those blissful, Internet bubble years (because of course that's the last time most of us had money), I loved to shop.  Sometimes I shopped for entertainment.  But now that money is tight again, it's all I can do to shove my bruised debit card into those little machines. 

I have friends who are able to enjoy shopping, even when they are completely broke, through the power of credit.   I have often envied them their ability to put silly things like interest rates from their heads when faced with a really great pair of boots. 

However, it's the holidays: the great American celebration of material and gastronomic excess.  Tomorrow I will  brace myself for the mirth and gaiety and try to remind myself that both pounds and debt are easily shed with a little January self-control.  This frivolity thing is not easy for me. 

The mall.  There, in the name of Santa and the GDP, go I.

At the dentist's office yesterday morning, I read a Newsweek essay by Senator McCain.  He was making a pretty good argument against the use of torture.  Now, I don't think most people think torture is a good idea, so it's not too difficult to make an argument againt it, unless you're Dick Cheney.

McCain's points were interesting - he of course made the moral point (that DUH, torture is WRONG), but he also pointed out that it doesn't really work.  People threatened with or actually in the process of having their fingernails pulled out may very well say anything to get you to stop.  I don't know about you, but a little waterboarding or electric shock to the genitals could make me cough up some dirt on my company's by-laws, whether or not I actually knew what they were.

Still eerier was the way they categorized torture.  Apparently, Cheney thinks anything short of organ failure or death is acceptable.  There was some talk of bad smells versus cold water versus sleep deprivation (though I've been subjected to THAT, and while it makes you pretty grumpy and maybe a little depressed, it isn't enough to break you).  Things like bad smells or having to stand for long periods of time are just "torture lite," and are apparently also "commonly accepted." The very discussion of what is and isn't cruel and inhuman seems a little too Orwellian for me.

What is going on with our administration?  When did we become the bad guys? 

Do we really believe 2+2=5?

I do love the Emerald City.  I love that they send the little angel home almost every day with craft projects. I love that she gets to go next door to the library for story hour on Wednesdays and goes to chapel to see some singing lamb and gets to play musical instruments with her back-up band.  I love that they give her love and Play-doh and try their hardest not to make her hair look like There's Something About Mary with the barrette, even though last night her bangs were sticking straight up like a bad Dippety-Do ad in Seventeen magazine circa 1989.

But people, stop with the dressing up all the time.

First there was "Harvest Day," which was The Emerald City's response to that damn pagan holiday in October.  The little angel was supposed to dress up as a farmer or her favorite vegetable. We forgot all about it, since she was up partying all night and we barely dressed ourselves as our Favorite Employed People in time for work.

Then, there was the Thanksgiving party. I did remember to send along turkey stickers, but forgot to dress her appropriately. 

Now I'm staring at a note saying they will be celebrating the Day of the Young Reader tomorrow.  She is supposed to dress up as a character from her favorite book. Then, probably to stop people like me from making up characters like "little angel goes to daycare," they are supposed to bring along the accompanying book.  Good grief.  I don't sew!  The little angel does not have a wardrobe of animal costumes!  Hello?  I just sent the damn turkey stickers LAST WEEK!  Stop the insanity.

So I'm thinking about dressing her in all brown and sending along her trusty copy of Everyone Poops.  What do you think?

The little angel's mind was recently blown by the appearance of the Christmas tree.  She got so excited she filled her size 5 Cruisers three times in an hour.  Well, it was either the tree or the fact she mowed down a half-bag of dried apples in the Target dollar aisle while my beloved and I grabbed stocking presents.  When we got home, I glanced at the back of the bag, which has been in the diaper bag for a good two weeks.  "Refrigerate after opening," it said.  Hmmm.  Isn't the point of dried fruit that you don't have to refrigerate it?  Maybe I'm missing something.

We have a pre-lit tree, Martha Stewart.  When my beloved and I first got together, we got real trees every year.  I grew up with fake trees and had always wanted a real one.  When I was pregnant, we gave in and got a fake - I had just started to really swell, and the thought of grunting around on the floor amidst sap and needles just about did me in.  I think the fake actually looks okay, but you have to spend about a half hour adjusting all the little boughs so they fill in the gaps.  The little angel had no idea what I was doing, but she busily flitted around the tree messing with the needles as long as I did, stopping only to poo some more apples in glee.

I decided to leave off the bulbs that might crash to the floor and shatter into thousands of angel-cutting and/or choking bits, a good decision considering the little angel is almost three feet tall and has the wing-span of a California condor.  She didn't really understand the concept of leaving stuff ON the tree, so most of the ornaments are now on the floor.  I kept rehanging them for approximately an hour before I realized that this, too, must be acquiesced.  That, the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen now covered in thousands of turkey stickers, etc.  My beautiful little house has been demolished more in the past three months than in the little angel's entire first year of life.  The toddler draweth near.

It was all I could do to drag her away from TWWEEE! TWEEE!  to take the Bubble Party, as we now refer to the hated bath.  Last night, though - was it the tree?  The apple issue?  The end of a developmental phase?  She entered the bubbles standing, as she has for exactly one month, screaming.  My beloved pointed to the duckie on her bathmat.  "Can you stand on the duckie?" he asked.  She extended one  pointed, pudgy toe.  "Duck."

"Can you SIT on the duckie?" he held his breath.  I held mine. We'd been trying to get her to sit in the bath for a month straight.  She squatted, chubby cheeks barely skimming the bubbles...then...plop.  Splash, splash!  The little angel rejoined her bubble friends with much joy. 

"Yeah!" she cried, throwing water all over the bathroom.  My beloved and I paused in shock.  "Bubbles!"

After about ten minutes, she was starting to turn into a red-headed raisin.  "Let's get out," I said.

"NYO!" she replied firmly.  "DUCK."

Well, that much has returned to normal. It was some small comfort when she was up from 3-6 a.m. this morning with a tummy ache.  NO MORE APPLES.  EVER.

Let the season begin.