The One Where I Talk About Boogers

Have I mentioned how brutal this cold season has been? Not so much for the adults in the household, but for the little one with the growing immune system.

It's always the same pattern. One week Desmond suffers through a disgusting cold, the next week he improves every day, has 2-3 days of seeming complete health, and then we'll hear a single cough in the night. The next morning, it's back to square one. The cold is usually the same too. It includes a cough that starts off dry and hacky and gradually gets more and more stuff behind it, until he's coughing up shrapnel. His face is swollen with congestion. And oh the snot. I could write a book about it. Dry green stuff, runny yellow stuff, the thin bubbles of mucus that inflate and then pop.

Wiping his nose is like trying to put a cat in a bathtub. There's flailing and screaming and pinning down of limbs. The mom and dad tag-team effort is the best way to go, with one person holding legs and arms and the other bracing the head and wiping. Obviously when it's just one of us this method is not possible. In that case we just kinda throw tissues in his general direction and hope for the best.

I used to be one of those people who found it off-putting to see a child out and about with a runny nose. Ha... haha. Oh sweet, naive me. Little did I know. To avoid that I'd either have to never leave the house or tape a folded tissue to his nostrils.

In all of our snot struggles, we have found one of the most vile and amazingly effective products out there. The NoseFrida:

Otherwise known as the SnotSucker

You literally suck your kid's boogers out with a tube. There's a filter in the middle so there's never any snot-to-mouth action. But still. It's a miracle I even purchased this without gagging. The reviews are amazing and we were desperate. And I could not be any happier that I pushed through the chunks in my throat and bought this thing.

It still takes a good wrangling to get him to sit still, but the process is quick and efficient. I'll admit it. I'm in love with the Snot Sucker.

I talk about it more in my latest column. Feel free to check it out.