The Return of the Broken Toe

So it's once again the middle of the night, and for a change everything is quiet.  Rex has started sleeping through the night more or less, although he still wakes up every night to practice his rolling and crawling techniques.  Veronica did the same thing at this age, and I remember thinking, What the hell is wrong with her? when her antics woke me up.  So now we hear Rex at night, strumming the bars of his crib in the dark, babbling to himself, grunting and squeaking, doing arabesques.  I don't mind.  At least I'm not having to feed him at night any more.

But tonight I'm up, because I have a cold that makes my nose feel like it's full of pepper, and I'm extremely pissed that a cold, of all stupid things, is keeping me up at night now that Rex is sleeping better.  And what's more, both the kids are sick, so we've put a humidifier in each of their bedrooms.  It's to make sure their little noses don't dry out, or their lungs don't burst into flames, that sort of thing, which apparently is the worst that can happen.  Whatever.  You have to put a dash of salt into the water that goes into the humidifier, and the salt helps make the steam come out.  The instructions actually say a dash, or maybe it was a pinch, of salt.  Both measurements are equally ridiculous, and I never get the amount right. The most offensive part is that the humidifier wasn't made in China.  It was made in the good old USA.  

So I'm up because it seems Rex's humidifier isn't making enough steam, and I'm worried that his antics will cause enough dry friction in his crib to actually make him combust, or something like that.  I go to the kitchen and put what seems like a pinch (because a dash apparently wasn't enough) into my hand.  I'm navigating the dark of his bedroom, heading for the red glinty light of the humidifier, when one of my toes catches on the footstool, and I stumble onto the bed.  I almost scream out loud.  Shit, shit, shit fuckety fuck yeow!  Ouch.  I'm certain my toe is broken. The silver lining is that I've managed to hang onto the salt, so I toss it into the humidifier and stumble back to the kitchen.  I put a grape popsicle from the freezer on my toe.  It doesn't help the pain. I eat the popsicle in bed.  

The funny thing is I've broken this toe before, also in the middle of the night, about eight years ago. It's the middle toe on my left foot, my 'Wednesday' toe, as Veronica would say.  I banged it on the wall in the hallway while running naked back to my room from the bathroom after I realized, mid-pee, that my in-laws were sleeping down the hall and might see me naked. I'd forgotten they were visiting and this was before kids, before pajamas and my hideous feeding smock and Cary's ratty brown-beaver bathrobe that makes him look like a homeless Joe Namath.  Before all of it, I used to sleep nude because it was easy and fun and I rarely had to get up in the night, so I was never cold.  And that night I really did break my toe, so Cary had to piggy-back me to the Emergency Room that is thankfully just a few blocks from our house.  (That really comes in handy.)  The kicker was that we were due to leave at 5 am that morning for our honeymoon in Mexico, so we had the taxi pick us up at the hospital, after we spent $500 to learn that there is really nothing you can do for a broken toe.