We can all label other people's children as halfsies, or easy kids. The kids who don't have to charge like a knight into a joust into everything they do. Kids who only kinda get sick. Or only kinda have sleep problems. Or only kinda have temper tantrums.
Okay, maybe they don't actually exist, maybe the idea of a child who is easy is just a figment of the imagination and wishes of parents the world over. If one of those kids do exist, maybe they grow up to be the Hannibal Lecter's of the world and we should just be cool with our needy little poor sleepers with attitudes and feeding issues.
Sigh.
That said, we all know that while we'd gladly run into a burning buildings after soaking in gasoline for our children, we do not have to like them all the time. Honest truth, love my kids blindly. Don't happen to always like them. Would do anything for them, but would give a kidney for a five second break most days. I mean, I can't even remember the last time I went to the bathroom without a resounding applause and "mommy potty!" just before I flushed.
So, the Beans is sick. Being that he is not a halfsies kid, AT ALL, he went full boar. Why have ONE ear infection, man, when you have two ears? What's the point of having a fever and making mom search for the damned thermometer if you can't yield a number greater than 101? Who needs a cough when you can choke on phlegm? And, of course, why the heck would you just have a runny nose when you can make your family wish they had hip waders to better navigate the rivers of your snot with?
But while I was feeling nothing but pity and sympathy on day one and two, I began wallowing in my own pathetic misery by day three. So by day four and a half when Beans was on the slight upswing I realized something.
There is something much worse than a sick child. The child who is finally starting to feel better after days of infirmary is much, much worse.
Beans would oscillate between the utterly male/baby conviction that no one in the history of suffering had ever suffered as much as he was and then would swing to the other end of the pendulum and was like a squirrel on a crack-speed cocktail. Running around like a madman, laughing in a manic way ... then coughing like a three-pack-a-day-habit while crying and choking on his own snot while moaning "mama" and wanting nothing more than me holding him.
Hold him, I did. Whilst praying fervently that the misery would pass, and the copious amounts of hand sanitizer I was requiring everyone to use in addition to the bleach cleaning wipes that rarely left my side were doing their job and preventing the plague from spreading.
But today I woke up and I sound like Louis Armstrong. Fingers, toes and eyes crossed that I am the only marked one in the house. Again, I am reminded about the main difficulty in living with men. It has nothing to do with toilet seats in the wrong position, fart jokes, or never owning breakables or white items. No, it is the dreaded man cold.
So the point of this post was, in summary: whine, vent, complain, pray!
