Petri dishes

Kids are little petri dishes of contagion.

Now, I don't mean to offend all the moms out there, because kids are great. The most beautiful sound in the world to me is the sound of a child's laughter. When kids laugh, it is the sound of pure joy. Kids haven't learned to NOT laugh at the politically incorrect or socially unacceptable; kids haven't learned that sometimes adults laugh even though it isn't funny; kids don't laugh with bitterness or cynicism. When kids laugh, it is because they are truly happy and something is truly funny to them. That is a beautiful thing. We should all strive to be more like children in that respect.

However.

Little kids are oversized petri dishes of infestation, disease, crud, and cooties. One sick kid in a kindergarten class of 30 (or 45 or however many kids are in the average kindergarten class these days) turns into an epidemic outbreak. It isn't just the one kid that gets sick. All 45 of them get sick. They carry the plague home to their brothers and sisters and parents. The brothers and sisters infect all 45 of the kids in their respective classrooms, who then infect their brothers and sisters and parents and so it goes. The parents become infected, and because the economy is so fucking shitty, there is no calling in sick at work; now we have an entire office filled with both married and single people infected with this affliction, and they each infest all their friends and relatives.

Which is how Sunshine and I got the crud.

His oldest son has two little kids. They are absolutely beautiful little girls. However, they go to public school, which means they are little petri dishes of contagion. One of them caught the crud and took it home. Daddy got sick and took it to work.

This shit must be pretty mean, because Sunshine never gets sick. Like, really. He has been sick three times in five years. In contrast, I have been sick at least 15 times in those same five years: sinus infections, flu, bronchitis, colds, allergies, even pneumonia once. And that's just the respiratory shit I've had. We'll ignore the isolated incident of crud that makes one puke that has floored me a couple of times since I met Sunshine; we shall ignore the staph infections that I have caught in hospital settings along with postoperative nausea and vomiting; and migraines don't count in this context.

So when Sunshine refused to kiss me the other night because he didn't want to get me sick, I just threw shit at him and reminded him that he had already kissed me during the time period between his exposure and the manifestation of symptoms. If he catches something, I am never far behind.

And I think I am catching up. As I balanced his checkbook last night, I felt snot trying to drip from my nose. That? Is not my allergies that have been killing me. That? Is the crud that is trying to kill Sunshine right now.

Parents, how do you do it? How do you LIVE through all the shit that little kids pass around?

 Seriously, I grew up in the days of yesteryear, long before there were antibacterial hand gels and antimicrobial countertops and antimicrobial towels/sponges/mattresses/whatever. I grew up playing outside, eating dirt and snorting worms. I grew up with a mom that threw all three of us in a room together and locked the door when one of us got sick. (I don't blame her; with three kids, it was a certainty that all three of us would eventually catch it, so she wanted us all sick at the same time to get it over with fast instead of drawing it out for weeks and weeks and weeks.) I grew up playing outside, getting bit by all manner of chiggers/mosquitoes/no-see-ums.  I grew up in the oh-so-unsanitary 70s and 80s, so I actually have a decent immune system. Chicken-pox? I had such a mild case that the doctor could not and would not guarantee that I wouldn't catch that shit again later; which means that to this day, I avoid kids with the chicken-pox like my life depends on it; hey, it just might. I can't imagine how much MORE often I would be sick if I had children; would I ever get to live free of medicines?

(OH to have an immune system like Sunshine's, but that's a story for Robin Cook or one of those other people that write about medical marvels and scientific wonders...)

Somebody send me some vicodin-chip-cookies to go with the green, death-flavored syrup I am going to buy to help me sleep at night while all of my airways plug up with mucus. That's right, I am going to town. Hey, I can't stand another day of sitting at home, watching home improvement shows on my teevee while I search the internet for job opportunities. It's too depressing. I am going to go be the evil bio-terrorist who spreads the crud to everybody I come into contact with.

If I haven't posted a new post within the next few days, somebody please check at Guantanamo Bay for my waterboarded carcass, as I fully expect one of homeland security's webcrawlers to mark me as a jihadist after mentioning bio-terror in this post.