Thanks Everyone

This week was pretty stressful due to my daughter and I both getting a cold,* so I have been pretty tired. Being sick alone is tough, but when your little one, now 23 months, is coughing and choking on phlegm when she sleeps, almost every 10 minutes, it’s really a difficult experience like no other. You feel completely powerless, and incredibly frustrated at yourself as a parent. The best solution I have found though is to use saline drops in their nose.

When she turned 1 year old, she came down with a cold or bad flu, and was coughing and choking in her sleep for 5 days. All of us were extremely sleep-deprived and stressed, and she was much too young for real medicine. But someone told us to use saline drops (available at any pharmacist) instead. The saline drops hurt when you put them down their nose, and they hate it, but within minutes, the nose clears out, and by extension, the throat begins to clear out because there is nothing dripping from the nose to the throat. She slept much better that night.

For this cold, we did the same thing for Baby, and her nose cleared out pretty quick. The throat took longer, as expected, but in a few hours she was coughing less, enough that she could sleep. The following day got even better. Even when I had the same cold, I used the saline drops (they really sting, believe me), and it worked pretty nicely. The brief discomfort saves, hours and days of nasal/throat problems, believe me, plus no side-effects from drugs.

Interestingly, when the Buddha defines suffering in his first sermon, he states it as follows:

“Suffering, as a noble truth, is this: Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; association with the loathed is suffering, dissociation from the loved is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering — in short, suffering is the five categories of clinging objects.

Sickness is among the attributes of suffering, but its true. We all get sick from time to time, there seems to be no realistic way to avoid it. We just have to make do with what we can.

The good news is that Baby is doing better now, sleeping pretty well, and being her usual stubborn self. She’s definitely in the Terrible Twos phase, and gets very upset when she can’t do what she wants, or we insist something on her that she doesn’t want, like getting dressed. It’s a real fight to get her to wear a certain shirt, even when we let her make the choices.

There’s just not much we can do while she’s undergoing the Terrible Twos. It just takes patience (which is easy to lose when you’re sleepy and tired too), but we just take it day by day. For the most part, she is a lot of fun to be around, but when we disagree, she can be very stubborn, scream, kick and cry. She won’t be doing this at age 16, so it has to end sooner or later.

On the other hand, her mind is developing so fast. We taught her how to count to five recently, and she enjoys showing off for us. Suddenly, out of nowhere though, she learned to count to ten, without us teaching her. We think she learned it from an episode of Peppa Pig, her favorite cartoon. This was an episode where the kids were playing hide and seek, and counting to 10. Somehow, she picked up on it, and started counting to 10. Sometimes she forgets 3 and 6, but she can easily remember the rest. Quite amazing.

Also, her language skills are improving so that old words she learned sound better than before. She uses less “baby words” and more normal words. Because Baby is bi-lingual, learning both Japanese and English, she tends to learn a little of one, and a little of the other. Some of the words she knows are Japanese words, some are English. ‘Flower’ for example is happa (葉), which is Japanese for leaf (close enough), but ‘Apple’ is apple. If say ‘flower’ she says, “No, Daddy. Happa.” If my wife says ringo (リンゴ), the Japanese word for apple, Baby corrects her too. She can form basic sentences now like “poo-poo deta”. Poo-poo is of course poop, but deta (出た) is the Japanese word for ‘come out’. Again, she’s mixing words. I think as her language skills develop, she’ll learn to differentiate them more, so I am not worried.

Anyways, thanks all for your support and patience lately!

Namuamidabu

* – My wife almost never gets sick, neither does her father. Must be in the DNA, or something they eat in the Japanese diet.