When Mommy Gets Sick

Everything falls into shambles.

Seriously.  I came out of a two-day long fevered stupor to find dishes  piled to the ceiling in my sink, my trashcan piled impossibly high, and three- count 'em, three - full trash bags sitting haphazardly around my kitchen.  There are soda cans, water bottles, and cereal bar wrappers littering my living room, and countless Ramen noodle package pieces peppering my counters. 

It's like the Collective just went into chaos mode in the absence of the Queen.  (No, I'm not that full of myself, that was a lame Star Trek reference, for anyone out there who doesn't happen to know what the Borg are.)

So you can see what I'm doing now, instead of tackling this depressing mess that I didn't even get to help make, because, well, it's depressing.  I'm debating on the delegation of tasks between my little worker bees, because in all fairness, they know that when the trashcan overflows, it's time to take it out, and "out" doesn't mean to pull out a new bag and hang it from a kitchen cabinet.  They know that empty cans, bottles, and wrappers go into said trashcan, and not left wherever it happens to fall, to be picked up by Mom when she springs back to life; and they know that dishes, at the very least, should be rinsed and stacked so that I don't have to fight off angry mutant slime monsters when I'm able to load the dishwasher.

It's time for me to sit my family back down and explain the importance of basic cleanliness and how everyone in the house pitches in to keep things running smoothly, even when mom's so feverish that she's babbling incoherently about SpongeBob and nuclear physics.

Resistance is futile.

 

I Hate Being Sick...

My girls came home from school sniffling about two days before they got off for Christmas break.

I knew it was a recipe for disaster.

I'm not hyper-clean, I don't freak out when my kids or my dogs track mud into the house or leave muddy handprints on the outside of my back door (I actually kind of like the handprints and thought about having the girls recreate them in paint), but when someone gets sick, I'm fully armed with Clorox wipes and disinfectant spray.

I used to work in daycare and Pre-K, so I know how fast those nasty little germies spread.  I constantly clean doorknobs and door jams, the backs of chairs, the undersides of tables - all those places that kiddos stick their grubby little fingers and we generally overlook while cleaning.

When I worked in Pre-K, this tactic worked.  I once spared my class from the great flu outbreak of 2010, by scrubbing and disinfecting every single surface my kiddos touched, urging them to wash hands constantly, and catching boogies escaping from little noses before the kiddos had a chance to smear them all over their sleeves.
 

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At home, it doesn't work so much.  I don't know if I've sanitized so much that the little buggers are immune, or if my kids have just managed to find new ways to spread their germs.  I imagine now that the cleaning products I use have somehow been morphed into some kind of sustenance for the germs, a la Dinosaurs:

So now Levi and I are sick, and my girls are back to their normal, healthy selves.  I'm glad my girls are over it, don't get me wrong, but this being sick business is miserable. 

I'm off to the couch to sip green tea and watch the Croods with my girls.  Hope everyone else out there feels a hundred times better than I do!