Here’s what you can learn about yourself at 3:30 in the morning when you hear your just-turned-four year-old daughter coughing a wet, croupy, not quite seal barking cough and your dear husband is out of town and you didn’t sleep hardly a wink the night before:
* Even when incredibly out of it, you remember to feel whether she’s warm
* She’s not—next step, stop the cough so you can send her to school. Even when incredibly out of it, the following day is foremost upon your semi-conscious mind.
* You know there was a homeopathic remedy that worked for coughs and so you open your medicine cabinet only to find that at some point you had inexorable faith in calcarea carbonica.
* That isn’t the right remedy; pulsatilla is closest, plus you find one that is for overextended people and so you take it because it can’t hurt.
* Your eyes don’t work for the finest print in the middle of the night and for the second time since you bought pretty magnifiers about two weeks earlier you use them, ceding middle age.
* You can read the fine print with the magnifiers just fine.
She falls back to sleep. You look up remedies and remember ah, yes, spongia, which you ran out of a while back is the remedy you’d have chosen if you had them all. You close the computer and conk out beside her.
**
She’s not doing so terribly in the morning at all, barely a cough beyond the one every preschooler you know happens to have as a winter accessory.
