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^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Birdy is sick with a fever and a bad cough, and her nostrils look like they've been filled with fluorescent green pony beads molded from virus and snot. She cries and coughs and then coughs and coughs and gags, coughing, and then spits up a little and then is suddenly throwing up torrentially all over our bed while Michael holds a washcloth vaguely near the geyser of her mouth. Oy. Birdy cries and shivers in the bath, cries and shivers in a towel, cries and shivers in her pajamas back in bed, where I read to her and try not to smell the barf smell that is still shimmying off her hair in cartoon waves. Oy. Ben is revolted but doesn't want to miss the story I'm reading, and so -- smart boy -- has pulled our old cane-bottomed canoe seat into the doorway so that he can both listen and, need be, make a quick barf-inspired getaway. Birdy sleeps and coughs, wakes and coughs, cries all night.

By morning, I feel hung over -- as wrung out with exhaustion as a damp washcloth, even though my nose rallies, mustering all its strength to grow a festively enormous pimple the size and color of an atomic fireball. Birdy, meanwhile, has been flipped to the setting Chatty Cathy from the setting Tubercular Barfing Charlotte Brontë. She's eating crackers and yogurt, cheerfully kicking the rungs of her chair and watching the chickadees at the feeder. "In the game pick-up sticks do you pick up sticks or do you pick up pick-up sticks?" Sometimes I'll be sewing on my sewing machine and after completing an entire seam I'll realize that the needle has come unthreaded and even though I've been sewing, there are no stitches. My brain is doing something like that now. Birdy answers her own question -- "I guess you pick up pick-up sticks, which is why it's called pick up sticks otherwise it would be called just plain sticks" -- and is onto something new. "What if you made a basket out of hair? And you were like weave, weave, weave ... hair basket! Or, ha ha ha, what if your bangs grew, grew, grew so long that they were just your regular hair? Oh, wait, then I guess it would just be hair."

Still, given her sore throat and fever and the fact of strep creeping through her classroom like a thief, I decide to take her to the doctor. "I won't go!" she cries, when I admit that yes, she will probably get her throat swabbed. "I'm not going!" She sobs and makes a little fist and pounds it emphatically on her leg. "I'm staying home!" I'm trying not to smile over her woebegone ferocity. Poor Birdy. I promise that we'll get a video from the library afterwards, and this is only mildly comforting. She cries and cries, but then goes silent in the car and even, absurdly, skips through the parking lot when we arrive. Sometimes there's nothing like even the idea of a visit to the pediatrician to get a child's body back on the road to Wellville, right?

Birdy is an utter stoic during her appointment -- she's like a child-shaped column poured from concrete. Silent, stiff, and brave. Our nurse is new, and when, pre-strep-swab, I gesture at the plastic kidney dishes and say, "Birdy's kind of a gagger -- let's just be on the safe side and grab one of those," her face scrimples up with distaste. "Ugh," she says, "I hope she doesn't vomit!" "Oh, I'm sorry," I say. "What was I thinking bringing my sick and potentially vomiting preschooler here to try on a tweed skirt at the Talbot's fitting room ... here to finger the Tiffany engagement rings ... here to the Clinique counter to test under-eye concealer -- oh wait. No. I didn't. I brought my sick child to the doctor." Okay, I'm tired and irritated, but I don't actually say that. I say, "I bet she also hopes she doesn't vomit." And she doesn't. And she doesn't have strep either.

And so, after a brief stop to check out Caillou: The World's Most Annoying Family, we are home again. Now the video is on in its deadening, deafening Caillou way (CAILLOU DIDN'T LIKE THE WAY blah blah blah. I think Birdy's ears might be a little plugged), and I'm thinking about 4-year-olds and how, in their own high-maintenance way, they're so easy to care for. I spent part of yesterday at a meeting with a man who's going through some difficult issues with his teenaged son, and at some point he said in a genuine way, "It's hard for you, too, I'm sure, having little kids." And I said, "Not really," which was both true and not true. It's exhausting when they're babies and toddlers; it's alarming and heartbreaking and physically depleting and sometimes numbingly boring. But with big little kids like we have now? They're easier to spend time with, but still there's something so straightforward about it: You care for them bodily and emotionally, and they allow you to. You comfort and praise and stay close, and this is what they want (For the sake of argument here, I'm leaving out the part about how you also nag and snap and wring your hands). Laundering barfy sheets -- and laundering them again, later that same night -- is gross, sure, but in a strange way it's easy. When Birdy is covered in barf I know exactly what I need to do.