The Toughness of Babies

Sometimes I confess that I look at my children, sigh, and wonder why they are such whiny babies. I imagine that the answer to that question is that: They are babies. I can't feel their pain for them and sometimes, exasperated, will say to a crying child 'shake it off'. I have a nephew who used to literally stand up after falling down and shake whatever body part got the boo boo. He's nearly ten now and still hates for anyone to see him experience pain. Like a cat he wanders off to find a place to be alone and hurt. I'm thinking that someday he will not be a fun person to be married to.

You may have heard that areas of southern Wisconsin experienced some pretty bad flooding. Somehow my notoriously soggy basement did manage to stay dry through it, but we exceeded the one month average rainfall record set in any month in history by several inches last month. Things have dried out now, though it is raining right this minute, but that drying up brought us the most macho, steroided and fierce mosquitos I think I have ever been stung by. What has happened is that mosquito eggs that may have been laid several years ago never hatched because they didn't get wet enough. Rising floodwaters hydrated these little eggs and blamm-o. Worst mosquitos evah.

Scientists are saying that these uber-mosquitos can travel really long distances, too. I read that they were detecting Spring Green, Wisconsin Mosquitos in the suburbs of Chicago. (Sorry Splotchy and Bubs). I relayed this little anecdote to a friend who quipped "how can they tell? Is there a special Spring Green brand of DNA?" The answer to that question, for anyone familiar with Spring Green is yes. And I mean that in a good way). This means that even if we didn't get flooded enough to awaken the dawn of the dead genus of mosquitos, these mosquitos may have been awakened a hundred miles away. Coming across the state like valkyries with the singular intention of sucking my blood.

Bastards.

On Labor Day when we returned from our vacation at dusk we had to unload the car and that meant keeping the doors open for too long. All night we got bit by mosquitos in our beds. What an insult. And these bites sting. One bite and I am pissing and moaning like Paris in a jail cell. Which leads me back to the babies.

This morning I put the 4yo in the tub. Aside from a very apparent bug bite right between the eyes, when she took her pj's off I saw at least a dozen red welty angry bug bites on her belly and her back. Holy shit. She hadn't said a word.

The little ones are stronger than we know. Ben Wundrun is tearing up those 'mother of the year' nominating papers as we speak.