the summer wind came blowin' in ...

"His life was not particularly eventful, but he had had a couple of nice escapes from a fate less tame than the draft in a London hospital, which killed him in 1927."

so writes vladimir nabokov about his uncle konstantin, who served in the diplomatic corps. sadly, if my daughter should succumb this week, she won't even have lived long enough to have a couple of nice escapes to her name.

yesterday was so lovely, so temperate, so beautiful that we turned off the AC and flung open the windows. "let the breezes blow through our humble home," we shouted! and we danced in the late summer wind! we laughed and drank mead!

then we went to bed, with all the doors and windows flung open. ah how nice it was to sleep with a carressing draft. oh to be warm and snug in our beds as a gentle draft caresses our cheeks. ah, but! it turns out someone, who i shall not name but whose name is mrs nice guy, put the baby down in her crib last night wearing a sleeveless onesie and then ... DIDN'T PUT ANY COVERS ON HER.

everyone within a five mile radius was woken up at 7 this morning to the shrieking, enraged howls of our daughter ... who probably only slept so late because the drop in temperature had slowed the flow of blood to her tiny brain. the kidsicle was frozen solid, her little icy paws too cold to even touch. the frost that had settled upon her downy head made her hair all crunchy (ok, that detail was exaggeration for effect, but you get what i'm saying here: the baby was COLD and she was PISSED).

so yeah. now i feel like we are just waiting for the child to come down with west nile avian pneumonia, making us hate ourselves for all eternity. already we feel as bad as if we had left her overnight in the subzero meat locker at sam the butcher's. the self-loathing around here is not a pretty thing to behold.

mrs nice guy: i feel like the worst mother ever right now.
mr nice guy, secretly praising jesus that, for once, it was not his fault: oh sweetie, that's because you are.

if no updates are forthcoming, it can only mean that we have hanged ourselves ... and not in the saucy michael hutchence accidental auto-erotic asphyxiation sort of way either.

UPDATE! i stand corrected, by my own mater nice guy no less. "the final word in this tragic story" ... ? we shall see, mater nice guy. we shall see.