Miracles R Us

Sunday night Liza woke up screaming in the middle of the night because not only was she entering week 4 of her cold ("Hello, I'm the Ambassador from the Land of Snot and Phlegm, pleased to meet you. You might not want to shake my hand.") and choking to death on her own phlegm, but her teeth were hurting and apparently invisible demons were sticking her with pins and the babies were starving in Africa ... that sort of screaming. After liberal doses of pretty much every OTC drug I could find in our bathroom without turning on the light (hmmm, could be Benadryl, could be vaginal suppositories ... what the heck!), I finally managed to get her to drift off into sorta-sleep. She was still startling awake every five minutes, looking around wildly, then falling asleep again, but at least she was quiet. After a while the startling stopped, and I looked down, and not only was she dreaming, she was talking in her sleep. Whole freakin' sentences, with inflections, and appropriate gestures. She's not any more coherent when she's asleep than when she's awake, but it's nice to know that she's got the patter down well enough to handle it while semi-conscious.

And today, after dragging my daughter in her Benadryl-induced coma to the library for story time, we got some food and attempted to eat lunch. As usual when she's teething, she wouldn't eat, although she did manage to choke down a few bites of an oatmeal raisin cookies in between attempting to burrow into the wooden tabletop. And as I'm sitting there watching her attempt to pass out in a vertical position, not only does the Benadryl haze lift (which it was scheduled to do about that time, according to the dosage instructions), but I swear to god, she healed herself. It was like one of those Claritin commercials where the fog lifts and you can see everything clearly ... this huge sheet of snot and phlegm and coughing and whining and throwing things and not sleeping and being generally miserable and evil just ... went away. Five minutes later, as we were changing her diaper and reading stories prior to naptime, she was as perky and non-sniffly and non-whiny as if the past three days hadn't happened. She went down for a nap with no problem (and no drugs), woke up two hours later as happy as a clam, and even ate a snack, for god's sake. I took her to run errands ... in the afternoon ... before dinner ... which is normally about as much fun as oral surgery. She was an angel, getting in and out of the car on command, not whining, and even walking nicely in the parking lot, holding my hand and not rolling around in the huge puddles.

If that's not a miracle, I don't know what is. Somewhere out there a nun has missed out on her chance at sainthood, because my daughter snagged the miracle first. You go, girl!