Riley had a nagging cough a few days ago and I realized how glad I am to be past the stage when every little physical anomaly caused me to panic and obsessively Google the wide variety of physical ailments he might be suffering from (remind me to tell you about the time we put the tip of a lubricated cotton swab in his butt and swirled it around when he was a few days old because we were freaking out that he was constipated; oh wait, that's pretty much the whole story).
Which is not to say I don't still power-worry on a daily basis (I carb load ahead of time so I have energy to cover all the big areas: Death, Pain, Illness, and Future Text-Messaging Addiction), but a cough? Eh, as long as it sounds normal and parts of his lungs aren't flying out of his nostrils with every hack, we're okay. I've found that the near-constant runny Toddler Nose often triggers the post-nasal-drip-type coughing, which his pediatrician told me was a pretty common symptom here in the Pacific Northwest for about, you know, EIGHT MONTHS out of the year.
(What's up, Arizona? You be looking good to me lately, babydoll.)
A child with a cough is both piteous and annoying. See, toddlers cough the way they do everything else in life: con brio. They haven't learned to put any social restrictions on their coughing, so they don't politely cover their mouths or hold up apologetic hands or attempt in any way to lower their volume level; instead, they blare out their cough with wide open mouths, flapping lips, and great volumes of spraying saliva. It sounds the way you would cough if you were trying out for a theatrical presentation of Sickly & Consumptive: a Tragicomedy!—in front of a partially deaf audience.
Can you be both heartily sick of the sound of someone's cough, and yet intimately familiar with its every nuance and on constant alert for any alteration of its pitch and tone? The answer is yes. You will wish it gone, but you will never tune it out. The overly anxious new parent stuff abates, but vigilance remains.
