Goodbye January! Catching up after travel and sickness

I’ve never been so happy to see February come.  For over a week now, there has been some one in our house that was disgustingly sick.  I was home with the kids all but one day last week, after returning from a weekend trip to Boston for WordCamp.  Thursday, I made it to the office for a day, thinking the kids were better, but two of them were sick again by the early evening. 

The third got sick about 1 am Friday morning, and I joined her, Mya, about an hour later.  I was completely wasted for about 24 hours and barely functional until late last night.  I was able to venture out into fresh air a couple times to watch the kids sledding Saturday after we got hit by a nice little snow/ice storm. 

Then later Saturday, my son got sick again, about 4 days after he got sick the first time.  I told him he was lucky that he had been OK, enough to go sledding while he could.  I think it was rolling down a hill of snow that ultimately put him over the edge and started him puking all over his snow boots.

Corbin was sick the rest of the night.  It had been a while since he had been that sick, apparently several years.  Despite the fact that he had just watched the rest of us empty our guts all week, he was very surprised that we couldn’t give him a pill or some medicine that would fix his eleven year old stomach. 

I had to think back a bit and the last time I could remember him being sick like that might have been when he was about 3 or 4 years old.  Talk about lucky, he just didn’t have the experience of being sick like that and literally didn’t know what to do, like not throw up on his own feet, the floor, etc.  He’s regularly been the kid in class that received perfect attendance awards.

I don’t think I ever received a perfect attendance award in my life.  When I was his age, I was typically sick with a flu bug like that at least a couple times a year.

He thought that after throwing up, he could just launch in and eat a couple hot dogs and drink 3 glasses of water.  Big mistake. 

I had to sit down with him and basically teach him how to be sick.

• No, there isn’t medicine that fixes this instantly
• No, you can’t drink as much as you want
• No, you can’t eat as much as you want even if you are hungry
• Yes, being sick might keep you awake most of the night
• No, you can not have something to help you sleep (too much TV commercials )
• Yes, its a good thing that you are awake, it might help save your life if you do throw up
• Yes, you have to carry a bowl with you when you walk back and forth to the bathroom
• In the immortal words of Jack Nicholson in the Bucket List, “You can’t trust a fart” (oops too late on that advice)

I had mixed feelings about the fact that he didn’t really know any of these life lessons.  It was awesome that he had been so healthy not to have gone through this and learned it the hard way, but I also felt like maybe I hadn’t done something sooner to teach him these basics sooner. 

The good news, he knows now!

Finally, last night after the family went to bed, my own appetite finally came back. I had eaten my first normal meal last night, but started actually getting hungry last night around 10PM.

I started doing some basic easy work, busy work you might say last night.  Stuff that needed to be done, but nothing that took a whole lot of brain power, concentration or effort.  I was saving that for today, for a fresh perspective unburdened by sickness and misery, and now that I’ve finally written a blog article after weeks and weeks it seems like, time to get going on that!