Hi, everyone! I hope you’re having a better week than I am. In my last post about the weather, I forgot to mention one of the biggest reasons that I hate the colder temperatures.
Germs. Ugh.
I’m sick!!!! 🙁
It’s almost inevitable here that once the temperature dips, someone ends up sick. And no matter how much disinfectant, Purell, and the like are used, it’s difficult to prevent illness from spreading to at least a few people here in the house.
This past week, #s 5 and 6 were sick with terrible colds. There’s nothing worse than a wee baby hacking away, cold and miserable.
Unless you’re the mom hacking away, cold and miserable.
The view from my bed.
I can’t complain, because generally speaking, I’m quite healthy. I rarely get sick, even when I’m taking care of little germ-ridden people. And anyone who has kids knows how difficult it can be to dodge little kid germs, because when they’re sick, little kids just… ooze. They really do. Their noses drip a congealed mess that would make a grown man gag. And it does; I’ve see The Captain do it.
(For the record, I think moms are a whole lot tougher about handling the nasty fluids of childhood. Example: a few years ago, we were eating pizza for dinner, and #3 began to choke. He choked so badly that as I was slapping him on the back, he vomited. Right into my hands. Because he was still choking, the logical thing to do was to splash the vomit onto my empty plate so that I could focus on the making-sure-he-was-breathing part. He was, of course, fine. I cleaned up the mess, but couldn’t find The Captain. Where was he, you ask? Hiding in the bathroom. Still eating his pizza. Because he found the whole catch-vomit-with-your-hands thing so distasteful. His need for hygienic mealtimes did not extend to eating pizza in the bathroom, apparently…)
So I spent the beginning of the week caring for #5 and #6, which basically means chasing them down with tissues and yelling at them to stop touching… anything, like other siblings. Doorknobs. Each other. Just…don’t….touch…anything. Ew.
But #1 ended up sick as well. She had a terrible sore throat and was coughing. So 50% of our children were down.
And #1 is not a good patient. She was legitimately really sick and uncomfortable, but the first night of her being sick was accompanied with tears and whining. I couldn’t even object. Because I realized,
She’s sooo me.
I may have been tough enough to give birth to six kids, but give me the flu or a stomach virus, and I’m moaning and pouting in a ball of sniffling self-pity.
And sure enough, Monday night I had a headache. Which developed through the night into a full-blown, feverish, snotty mess. And more headache. Or a brain aneurysm. I’ll let you know.
As some of you may know, it’s hard to be the mom when you’re sick. Despite how sick you feel, you need to still function. Or you don’t, and it ends up something like this:
But of course it’s never enough to just be sick, right? Just before bed that night, as I was closing my sick, tired eyes, The Captain climbed into bed and casually said,
The Captain (casually): “A pipe is leaking near the hot water heater. We need to call in a plumber. I put a bucket there, but it might burst.”
Me: ??? #%&^^@&#???
The Captain (in bed, eyes closed): zzzz….zzzzz……
…because when you’re sick, a potential pipe burst sounds divine, doesn’t it?
So Tuesday morning began with a round of calls to plumbers, with one finally agreeing to fix the piping. For 4-5 hours worth of work. Splendid.
Instead of trying to snooze away my illness, I was now forced to “monitor” the plumber. You know the drill. You can’t leave a stranger lurking in your home while you nap the day away, right?
(Like he was “lurking”. He wasn’t. Like he was really going to take any “valuables”. We don’t have any. Like moms “nap.” We don’t. Ever.)
I spent the day wobbling from couch to kitchen to couch to bedroom, trying to keep the irritable, sick little ones happy while gulping down vats of hot tea and muttering about how unfair it is that SAHMs don’t get sick days. Ever. I also did my best to hide my haggard face/mismatched socks of sickness from my plumber.
The sock drawer was much too far away, & searching for a match would be a waste of energy.
And of course the plumber needed to go in and out of the house in order to get his work done. We have a monitor attached to our front door that creates a chime sound every time the door is opened. (It’s a preventative measure for avoiding kids escaping the house undetected, and being returned to us by a bemused neighbor… more about that another time.) So each time the door is opened, a “BING BONG!” sound peals through the house.
Which means that there were approximately 579 “BING BONG!”s between 11:30am-5pm.
So Tuesday consisted of 579 BING BONGS, 322 used tissues, 57 coughing fits, a gallon a hot tea, and not nearly enough Nyquil. Oh, and vomit. #5 woke up in a coughing fit that resulted in throwing up all over her crib. (sigh)
The worst part about being sick is the lack of control over the environment that I normally have. Instead of things being relatively neat and orderly, my house was a disaster and once all six kids were home, the atmosphere morphed into The Lord of The Flies.
There were battles over the remote. There were Goldfish crackers crushed into the carpet. Somebody, I don’t know who, moved a stool to the upper cabinets and swiped a bag of Halloween candy and began dispensing it to siblings like it was…. candy.
And I was too tired and sick to even care. In fact, I didn’t even bother to move from my semi-comatose state on the couch, languidly tossing my cough drop wrappers on the floor. Because at that point, who gave a damn?
But thank God for The Captain, who swept in at just that moment with a big bag of Wendy’s food for the kids’ dinner, Puffs tissues, and enough energy to do all of the things that he normally wouldn’t do.
Because normally, I’d be doing them all.
But he did a fantastic job. I awoke from my delirium at about 11:30pm to find all kids in bed fast asleep (hey, you may think that should be a given, but you never know, right??), and the house immaculately cleaned. And when The Captain saw that I had awakened from my coma, he brought me some Motrin and gave me a sweet hug.
So though I’m still sick, I’m feeling slightly better today. Most of the kids are recovered, too. So far The Captain seems to have escaped the germ run. A good thing, because:
