Put our house under quarantine!!!

When my kids get sick, I have a few pre-conditioned responses…

• First, I go into “survival mode”, especially if there are bodily fluids involved (like there was this past weekend). Towels…buckets…laundry baskets…Pedialyte…flat Sprite…crackers…hand sanitizer…
• Next, I turn into a one-woman investigative team…where did they contract it? Church? Meijer? Playworld? I create a timeline for where we have been the last week, calculating the length of a virus incubation period. Do I know any of this? Of course not…and it usually just makes me regret every grocery cart I forgot to wipe down or a nose I wiped on my sleeve or whatever. Can’t get away from that guilt, right?
• Then I pull out my calendar and figure out what I can/can’t do in the next week or so, because inevitably, the whole family will come down with it. (Ben and I have escaped so far.)

Lastly, we just settle in for the long haul. Of course it was beautiful outside while we were inside with a lethargic kid holding a Country Crock container on her lap watching Sesame Street reruns. And it was a long Friday night, sleeping on the floor next to Madi’s bed, helping her lean over to throw up into the trash can and stumbling around trying to find the Tylenol at 4 a.m. to bring down her fever. And we had about 10 minutes of reprieve on Sunday where we thought we were in the clear before Parker tossed his cookies.

But in the end, there is nothing worse for me than to see Parker curled up on my shoulder with flushed cheeks and absolutely no energy. And there is nowhere else I would rather be than snuggled right up with Madi and whispering in her ear that everything is going to be all right.

I just started reading Sydney Poiter’s spiritual autobiography, and in the first chapter he talks about his childhood on Cat Island in the Bahamas and he talks about how, apart from all forms of media and outside influences, he learned about life from the interactions with his family and the nuances of emotion from observing his parents communicate. He contends, and I agree, that a child’s character is not set from their genetics alone, but they learn from their environment. Learning that your parents will take care of you, love you, and won’t leave you alone in your time of need are all things that help build a child’s self-confidence and ability to venture out from that place of safety, because they know that you will be there to hold them and whisper that while the world seems to be crashing down around them, everything will be all right.

It’s quite the experience, being a parent…