Cough-Cough-Hack to School

There are certain things that I can always count on happening. The sun will rise and set, the moon will wax and wane, and my kids will bring home every germ within a twenty-mile radius during the first few weeks of school. It's all inevitable.

Despite the required twenty gallons of hand sanitizer on the school supply list, they're always sniffling and coughing within the first ten days. I'm thinking of swapping out their shorts and t-shirts with hazmat suits because I am seriously weary of them being the recipients of everyone's "sharing." They have a knack for it. It's like they're all, "Hey, kid with the runny nose! You can use my shirt as a tissue!"

After a blissfully illness-free summer, the last weeks of August are filled with fevers and snot and hacking coughs and scratchy throats. One of the kids catches it, and then I spend the next few days trying to contain the ick before it spreads throughout the house. But it never, ever works because - just as you can't stop death or taxes - you apparently can't stave off a household cold epidemic with all the Clorox wipes and screeches of cover your mouth! in the world.

And then ... then ... it ends up falling squarely into my lap. Or more precisely, my head and chest, in the form of a cold so heinous I don't even feel like doing laundry.*

*Oh wait. I never feel like doing laundry.

Anyway, it's like pouring salt in a wound. After I've spent a week nursing all my kids back to health, I get this monster cold. I always get it much worse than any of them, like it's a conglomeration of all the germs they've each contributed so generously (via helping themselves to whatever I'm drinking and using me as a human Kleenex and explaining things thisclose to my face, spraying me with a fine mist). They bounce back within a day or two; I'm sick for a week or more. And yet, while they get to lay around while they're sick (and complain endlessly about it, no less), I'm still on Mom duty because the kids don't take care of themselves. Those assholes.

I have one of those apps on my phone where it shows you your old tweets and Facebook posts and stuff, so you can see what you were doing at this time one or two or five years ago. Allow me to share a couple of screenshots.

See? I don't know what I was doing two years ago, but I guarantee I was probably just too sick to use the internet.

Because this happens every. Single. Year.

Maybe I should try to turn this into something positive. I mean, when life gives you lemons, you add sugar (and vodka), right? My voice is nice and husky right now as a result of all the coughing. Maybe it's a good time to moonlight as a phone sex operator, make myself a little extra cash on the side. (Oh, you wanna know what I'm wearing, baby? Okay ... I'm wearing rayon-blend stretchy pajama pants and an old ratty student council t-shirt from high school. Mmmmm, yeeeeahhh ...)

... Or maybe not.