Enough snot to retrofit the entire west coast.

Poor Beatrice has got a bad cold and it's wracking her our very foundation. Sweet little bug is struggling to sleep and last night I spent another night snuggling the rumbling snot-fest so Mama could sleep (while Bryce tap danced in her belly).

Bea's only had a couple of bouts of snot-ness in her short life, and what exacerbated the one before this one was the teething, as it's doing again.

Oh, what big teeth you have baby, erupting along the gum faults while you buck, roll and shake and olfactory volcanoes spew and spew. We're sure there are some severe allergy storms in the mix as well.

Bea'ing 2012.

But this too will pass; we've only just begun to experience the bittersweet ill-cicles of parenthood.

Once you get past the "God, I really need to sleep, baby" -- which always passes quickly -- then it's about you nursing and wishing your child to be better.

It's so hard to witness their misery, especially for a toddler who still can't quite articulate the pain, only the seemingly infinite sharing of the seismic.

We try to limit the baby Tylenol and ibuprofen, and right now Mama's giving her a bath for relief.

We've been told by our pediatrician and other parents that they've got to ride out the cold, and they're going to have a lot of them.

But I've never seen so much snot. Really.

According to Wikipedia:

A major function of this mucus is to protect against infectious agents such as fungi, bacteria and viruses. The average human body produces about a litre of mucus per day.

Wait, this is America and we don't do the metric thang. How much is a friggin' litre?

A little over a quart?

Holy moly.

How much mucus from Bea-quake?

Enough snot to retrofit the entire west coast.

(Which is what this picture of mucus cells looks like, or at least the Bay Area.)