Tasting menu

I went to summer school just once. It was during college and I went so I could get a science requirement fulfilled that I would have been all-too-happy to ignore. I took an Anatomy and Physiology course and from it I remember exactly one thing. I learned an excellent Scrabble word: vomer. The vomer is the bone under your nose, above your lip. I decided that summer, based on nomenclature alone, that the vomer is my favorite bone.

One momentous event that happened this week was overshadowed by E's big birthday and by our collective illness. However, it deserves comment.

We flipped L's carseats around. She's a forward-facing gal. High upon her Britax throne, she waves at her minions in adjacent cars, points to the bagel she can now see awaiting her, and wails that she's looking at the back of my head, that I don't spend every driving moment returning her smile. But most importantly, she and her sister can really commune.

But even as she ascended the next height of royal glory, she didn't escape the family plague unscathed. This morning as we were driving she sneezed a mighty sneeze. In the rearview mirror I could see two parallel lines of viscous goo marching down the soft fleshy crests that frame her vomer, pooling on the handle-bar ledge of her pacifier, and dripping deliberately, like an IV, into the open corners of her lax mouth. It didn't phase her in the slightest.

Our elder daughter, however, was scandalized. Mama! she yelled. I thought she was going to tell me her sister needed a tissue. No kidding, I was thinking, as I hoped that which I never hope on our morning commute: please let that next light turn red. Please.

Mama! We don't supposed to eat our boogies!