I woke my husband three nights straight just to hold her. I'm not proud of that.

A first-person account. Published by LullaBreeze.

Ben had inventory week. He was out the door at 5:30 every morning to count pallets in a cold building. And I was waking him at 2, at 2:40, at 1:15, to be a set of hands.

Margot was five months. First cold. She'd been snuffling since Tuesday and by Thursday night it had turned into this whistling thing on the inhale, like air was having to squeeze past something to get in.

She'd take two swallows off a bottle and then rip her head back like the bottle had personally offended her.

Then cry. Then try again. Then rip back.

For an hour.

Here's the part I'd like to skip and I'm not going to.

I had nothing.

I mean I had things. I had the blue bulb from the hospital, which I'm now convinced is a decorative object. I had saline, because a nurse mentioned it once. I had my sister's old humidifier that I'd never taken out of the bag.

I had a bathroom I could fill with steam, and I did, at 2 in the morning, sitting on the closed toilet lid in a t-shirt holding a baby who was still whistling.

What I didn't have was a single thing in that house that would actually get it out of her.

And it was 2:40 in the morning, which is the exact hour when nothing is open, nobody is awake, and every decision you make is a bad one.

I ordered something at 2:51 a.m. from the bathroom floor, one thumb, eyes half shut. Paid extra for the fast shipping.

It came four days later. She was already better. It didn't matter.

Two nights after that I put her in the car.

3:15 in the morning. Pajamas. Ben's car because mine was blocked in. Margot in the car seat in her sleep sack, too tired to even be mad about it.

There's a pharmacy off the highway that's open all night. I stood in the baby aisle under those lights that make everyone look like they've been sick for a year, and I bought a bulb syringe — which I already owned — and a second bottle of saline.

That's it. That's what was available to me at 3:15 in the morning. The thing I already had, and more of the thing I already had.

I sat in the parking lot and cried with the engine running while she fell asleep in the back.

The third night, I stood on Ben's side of the bed for probably a full minute deciding whether I was allowed to wake him again.

That's the thing I actually want you to hear. Not the crying. That.

Standing in the dark doing math about whether you've used up your allowance of asking your husband for help with your own child.

He would have said yes. He did say yes, all three nights, without a word about it.

But I'd started keeping a little ledger in my head. And I was losing.

That's where that was heading — not toward some disaster, just toward me quietly becoming a person who felt like a burden in her own house at 3am. You can live a long time in that. It gets normal.

The thing that broke it open was a family video call.

Which is not where I expected to learn anything.

My cousin's fortieth. Fourteen people on the screen, everyone talking over everyone, someone's dog barking.

I was half-complaining about the week, and my cousin Dani — who has a three-year-old and had clearly stopped listening to the birthday portion of the evening — got up and walked into another room with her phone and said, kind of flatly:

"You know she can't do any of it, right? Blow her nose. Sit up. Sniff it back and swallow it. Roll over. She can't do one single thing you'd do. There's no version where it works itself out. That's you. It's all you."

And then, walking back toward the noise:

"And it's not the last one. Theo had like eight of these before he turned two."

Then somebody made her sing and that was the end of it.

I sat there with the call going on my laptop and did not hear one more word of it.

Because I'd been thinking about that week as a bad week. A thing that happened. Weather.

It wasn't weather.

Margot physically cannot clear her own nose. That's not a phase, that's just true for the next couple of years. Which means every single time she catches something, the exact same night is going to happen — and it's going to peak at 2am, because it always does, because lying flat and being little is a bad combination.

And I was going to meet it the exact same way every time. Unprepared. At an hour when the only store open sells me a bulb syringe.

The cold wasn't the emergency. The emergency was that I was going to keep shopping during it.

And then I remembered the shower.

Alli's baby shower. June. Before Margot was even born. Backyard, folding tables, the whole thing.

Her aunt gave her one of these. An electric one, in a box, next to a stack of impossibly small cardigans.

And the room did the polite thing. Somebody said "ooh, practical!" in that voice. Somebody else said "you'll be glad you have that." Alli said thank you and set it down and picked up the next bag.

I remember thinking it was a strange gift. You register for the stroller. The monitor. The cute stuff. Nobody puts the gross stuff on a registry.

I had seen the exact thing I needed, in a backyard, in June, four months before I needed it — and I thought it was a weird present.

So I got one. Obviously. That's not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that it sat in a closet, in the box, unopened, for about two weeks.

Because Margot got better. And when she's fine, at 4 in the afternoon, in the sun, it is very easy to believe you imagined the whole thing.

I only opened it because I was looking for something else and it fell on me.

I charged it and put it in the drawer in her room, the second one down, with the nail clippers and the thermometer, and honestly forgot about it.

February. Daycare cold, the real kind.

The one that goes through every family on the block.

4:10 in the morning. I heard her on the monitor doing the whistle again and my whole body went cold before I was even awake.

And then I got up, and got the saline, and did the drops, and waited a minute — you have to wait, that's the part I got wrong the first few times, going in too fast — and then I picked her up and got the thing out of the drawer.

Little light on it so I didn't have to turn on the lamp and wake her up all the way. Smaller tip, lowest setting, because she's a baby and I'm not trying to be a hero at 4am.

I was back in bed at 4:20.

Ben never woke up. Ben doesn't know that night happened. He has no idea I'm even writing this.

I lay there in the dark for a while, wide awake, thinking about that parking lot.

It didn't make her not get sick. She's had two more since. There was a stretch in April where nobody in this house was okay and I remember almost none of it.

But there's a difference between a hard night and a hard night where you're also powerless, and I didn't know how much of it was the second part until it went away.

Now it's just a thing in the drawer. Charged, because it lives on the charger, because the one thing I know for sure is that at 4am I am not going to be the woman who plugs something in and waits.

So — if you're still pregnant, or she hasn't gotten sick yet.

And you're reading this thinking you'll deal with it when it comes.

You will deal with it. That's what I want you to understand. You'll deal with it beautifully.

You'll deal with it at 2:51 in the morning on your phone, paying for shipping that won't come in time. Or in a pharmacy off the highway in your pajamas with a baby in the back seat, buying the wrong thing under bad lighting.

Or you can just have it in the drawer already.

It's not a fun thing to register for. Nobody's going to gasp when you open it.

It's the one thing on the whole list you'll reach for at an hour when there's nobody awake to help you.

Put it in the drawer now. Charged.

The one to have before you need it

LullaBreeze

The next cold will come at 2am. Be ready before it does.
Free shipping · 60-night guarantee

See LullaBreeze

If your baby is ever working hard to breathe — pulling in at the ribs, flaring her nostrils, grunting, or you just don't like how she looks — that is not something to solve with suction. Get her seen.