Thursday, January 27, 2011

Cootie Alert!

It wouldn't be winter without a few good colds spread along in the family the way one might pass the salt at the dinner table.  This one originated with my oldest boy and was handed down unceremoniously to the little one who hasn't learned the fine art of using a Kleenex.  E is a "sniffer".  L is a "wipe it up the full length of his sleeve", kid.

So when they get colds it drives me nuts. Yesterday L's cough was so bad that he came home early from school because his tummy was starting to hurt.  He couldn't stop coughing.  His appetite way down, his eye lids droopy.  The only silver lining in him getting sick is that he gets really cuddly when he's not well.  And I sacrifice my own good health to lap up all that cuddle time.  Even if I complain when I can't breathe through my nose or feel like something scraped off the bottom of a shoe, I love the snuggling.

The cough getting worse and changing during the night had us dropping E off at school and going straight to the doctors.  Necessary but unpleasant as that was.  The office teaming with all the sick kids it could hold.  The adults looking tired and uncomfortable knowing that whatever their own child had was likely nothing compared to the Typhoid Mary sitting next to them.  Every parent surreptitiously scoping out the children to see if they could find the sickest and persuade their own child to avoid them.  


Kudos to the parents who offered up their Blackberry and Ipods as entertainment to keep their kids away from the contaminated junior set.  This was a dire sacrifice, indeed, as it seemed the wait list was terminal.  I had long ago realized that even when a child is sick there is little you can do to shield them once they enter school.  So my boy was the only one very happily playing with the cootie toys.  Of course I was still white knuckling the disinfectant gel bottle waiting for him to come back to me to be decontaminated.  


Perhaps this will be a quiet weekend spent close to home.  Some scouring.  Some baking to entice an appetite.  Some crafts and perhaps a little play in the snow if we turn the corner on the cootie-zone.


Stupid school house germs. 

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