My adventures with snot.

Last night I snuck Baby into the bedroom because she is not feeling well and she wanted to snuggle up under the covers with me.  I had to sneak her in because Gaby refuses to let the cats sleep with us anymore just because they tend to get a little restless and play with the blinds or climb the curtains or (God forbid) PURR and wake him up... But this was BABY.  How could I say no to that face?

The thing about Baby is that when she was a baby, only one week old, in fact, she had a severe case of Rhinovirus which forced us to hospitalize her at the dreaded DMV emergency clinic for several days, where they drained the mucus from her nose and inserted a breathing tube. 

When she finally came home she had to be bottle fed (by me) every two hours (all through the night) for another several days (and nights) to be sure she regained her strength.  She almost died.  It was very scary and during that time when I was taking care of her we developed a special bond, so I'm sure you can understand how a) when she's sick she wants to be with me and b) I have this weird maternal instinct to take care of her.

So anyway, I snuck her into the bedroom and under the covers and Gaby was none the wiser.  We were sound asleep when I was awakend by a horrific sneezing fit from the little furry bundle beside me (Gaby was snoring so loudly that he never heard a thing).  I'm sure you have all seen your cats do those delicate little sneezes, then shake their heads, lick their paws and wipe their faces?  Yeah, well Baby is a whole other story.

Baby has developed a technique for sitting up, stretching her neck out and leaning it back at an angle like something from The Excorcist and sneezing from the depths of her soul to expunge all the mucus in her lungs.  Now you can see from the photo above that she has teensy tiny nostrils, so I'm sure you can understand my surprise when my face was hit with a wet, sticky mass of projectile cat snot that could have filled the inside of a jelly donut (not that anyone would WANT to fill a donut with cat snot, but you get the idea).

So there I was in bed, in the dark, with cat snot starting to congeal on my face.  I had to get us both out of there before the beast beside me (AKA Gaby) awoke.  I hustled Baby into the bathroom where I then performed a snotectomy with my trusty tweezers (actually, I used Gaby's tweezers - he'll never know, because he never reads my blog!) and methodically pulled the rest of the dried up, crusty snot from her nose.  I can assure you, there are things I would prefer to be doing at 2:30 am, but alas, I am a dedicated cat mommy and Gaby had to work in the morning, so I was on snot-removal duty.

Once I was done with the messy stuff, I brought Baby to her room (yes, our second bedroom is a nursery of a whole other kind!!) where I wanted to settle her into her own bed for the night.  Unfortunately, Rudy was comfortably nestled in and not in the mood for sharing:

 

I tried the couch downstairs, but it, too was buried under a heap of sleeping cats, so I brought Baby into my little shoebox of an office (one of the only cat-free zones in the house - besides my clothes closet and the pantry in the kitchen, though I have even found cats in there sometimes), settled her onto my lap in a blanket and tried to get her to go to sleep. 

I was so worried about Baby's nose getting clogged up again that I had visions of her suffocating during the night, so I wound up staying up with her all night, periodically cleaning her nostrils, cuddling her and generally trying to keep her sneezing fits to a minimum. 

Ok, I admit, I also spent some time on Facebook talking to Tamara my fellow insomniac, farming and doing Mafia stuff, after all, my computer was RIGHT THERE... But I must stress that I DID NOT get sucked into a turf war with some guy named Don Bender and spend $100 on my credit card buying pretend weapons to take out his Mafia because I am addicted to Facebook games or anything.  I was simply looking for a way to pass the time between snotectomies.  Really.

The good news is that Baby is doing much better today and I was able to get all the caked snot off my face.  The bad news is that I think I need a new pillow...