After spending much of last week fighting off various cold symptoms (sore throat, congestion, etc.) – which may have been just allergies? – I started this week feeling better. Still in Newborn Mode, of course, but better.

Then yesterday I got up at 7 (Jokes. Yesterday was totally a 4 a.m. Wake Up Day – Thanks, Truman) to get HD ready for school and I sounded terrible. Actually, not terrible…more like Phoebe when she has her sexy rasp from a cold and tries desperately to hang on to it by licking people’s coffee cups (Whoa. How do I remember that? And why do Friends references forever seem to pop up in my blog posts?). And since there were no other symptoms, not so much a big deal, although I definitely concerned most of the people I interacted with yesterday (yes, I actually got to see several adults during the day and didn’t even have to leave my house to do so!) because I didn’t sound great.

Today is, again, a different story. Now I sound terrible. In fact, I can hardly speak with any volume at all and my throat is starting to hurt, most likely from all the straining to be heard by my family. And that right there is where a sexy rasp turns into a pain in the ass because parenting without a full voice? Ummmmm, tricky. No one can hear me so they keep asking questions/requests and then my patience dries up super quick because not only am I repeating myself, but it’s for nothing because no one can hear me! Which is maybe a good thing since once my patience goes, I’m not sure I have anything worth hearing to say.

Thankfully, for this morning, anyway, it’s just me and the littlest two Littles, so I can be sort of quiet. Except not really because Lincoln’s main mode of communication these days is to say something which he will then keep saying until you say it back to him. Again, tricky, because even though I am trying to follow his rules, he doesn’t always know I am playing along. This is compounded by the fact that his language is really taking off right now thanks to a Hear No realization we had with him just before TJ was born.

It happened on RL’s first day of preK when I took LT in because of suspicious spots (turned out to be just a manifestation of a virus the kids were all fighting off that week) and the nurse discovered that his ear was totally (OK, not 100%, but way too close for comfort) plugged with wax. My kids – my boys, especially – are waxy, so this was not shocking, but when irrigating his ear couldn’t get it out and we had to buy SUPER expensive drops to help soften it and then irrigate again during Truman’s 2 week appointment….well, that was a little shock to the system.

Here I had been thinking all summer that Lincoln’s language was a little delayed because he’s the third kid and he’s got all these other people in the house talking for him, but it turns out, he couldn’t hear all that well (and who knows for how long?!)! Now that the (grossly, impossibly) large chunk of wax is no longer blocking his left ear, he’s already talking more and more clearly. He even started saying “Reeegen” in the last two weeks!

It’s just that, currently, all of his desire to converse is counterproductive to my desire to shut it. So instead I’ll spend the day drinking coffee (oh, darn) and tea and whatever else I can to get my throat back on track because this squeaking and squawking Mama bit has got to go!