I’m reminded frequently that you never know how frequently you can get sick until either:

• you work in an office with folks who have young children, or
• you have young children

I’m fortunate that we’ve not had much of a problem with this.  But it seems that summer brings trouble in spades.

I’m the kind of person who seems to only get sick at “down times”.  My body seems to know how to get sick over a weekend (preferably a long one), and be mostly ready for work again on Monday.  So, last week, my wife got sick (I’d not noticed because I thought it was just her allergies), and then by Friday, I was feeling pretty awful.  But, I’m an adult and a parent, and that means suck it up and put on the big-boy pants, and get on with life.  So, between medication and force-of-will, we carried on as best as we could.  (That didn’t stop me from working from home yesterday morning, since I’d been up till 1:30 on the phone for work, and was feeling particularly awful at 7 AM.)

Kids don’t look at it that way.

On the one hand, you have the Monster.  He doesn’t have the tools to tell us how he’s feeling, if he’s not feeling well or the like and… well, it takes obvious symptoms for us to notice at times.  Most of the time, he just soldiers on and we’ll only figure out in retrospect that something’s the matter.  So apparently yesterday morning, my wife noticed a few marks on him, thought they were bug bites or the like, and sent him to school… only to have the school nurse call me a few hours later to get him on suspicion of hand, foot and mouth.   A visit to the pediatrician a little bit later, and sure’nuff, it’s a recurrence of hand, foot and mouth.  No school till at least Wednesday. *sigh*  There’s not much to do but keep him clean, make sure that it’s not spreading, and give him Motrin for comfort.

On the flip side, you have R.  R is very verbal and will tell us what’s bothering him… or he might make it up, so you never know.  After I was already giving the Monster his ibu, R started talking about how he wasn’t feeling well and might have to go to the doctor.  So I asked him what he was feeling.  Scratchy throat, feeling warm, a few things like that.  And checking on it… yup, R seemed to have something, so he got some medication too, and sent off for an early bedtime which he resisted not one bit.

So… this parenting thing.  Fun and games, fun and games…

(Update from this morning – R is symptom-free, so he’s going to camp.  Monster, on the other hand…)