"My Nebulizer! Mine Mine Mine!"

You might guess, from the length of my post about trying to see sports writing as a subgenre of Sword and Sorcery, that my kid is fully recovered from his bug. Nope. And predictably enough, everybody else in the house has taken sick with it, too. We're all on the upswing now, but exhausted and brittle and so ready to be done coughing.

Here's the trick to getting a balky toddler to tolerate a nebulizer: Offer it to his brother. The real clincher with my small percussionist was that we found sounds to make on the nebulizer that nothing else in the house could make. Once it was an instrument, one that Gareth might want to take, suddenly the nebulizer was something Conrad would demand. Using it effectively to get his medication actually into his lungs was another matter, but we have progress on that, too.

Someday, when Conrad wins a Grammy with his all-repurposed-medical-devices jug band, you'll know it started with that damned nebulizer.

(Oh, and yes, it turns out that sports writing becomes quite readable when you recast all the athletes as Robert E. Howard's original version of Conan the Barbarian. I suppose this is what people who don't like poetry are doing when they sing all of Emily Dickinson to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas.")