Whining Time Station

The kids were sick this week, and so was I.  I was so sick I couldn't drink coffee.  Good thing Diet Coke is always there for me.  It never scolds me for running out of milk the way coffee does. Oh, Diet Coke.  Let's be best friends forever.

It wasn't the dreaded family stomach virus or anything, it was just one of those exhausting colds.  I went three days without doing laundry, and now I am entirely screwed on that front.  And the house is a disaster.  At a time when we should have been getting things organized for school to start next week, we were laying on the couch watching The Empire Strikes Back and whining. 

The whining gets old, so we try to keep it to designated Whining Times.  When we're all sick, we whine once an hour for two straight minutes, as loud and whiny as we can.  During that time, our living room is Whining Time Station.  It's like Shining Time Station, only more annoying and without the fun of seeing Mr. Conductor but thinking of George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television."

We were sick, we whined, we got over it.  Two days of trying to eke every last shred of energy out of my soul to take care of four sick kids when all I wanted to do was go back to bed.  We've had worse.  There was, of course, the Great Swine Flu Debacle of 2009, in which our family infected most of America with the H1N1 virus.  (I'm still really, really sorry about that, America.)

There was also an illness that our family still refers to as the Valentine's Day Massacre, which was a couple years ago.  This was during a time when I obviously had more time on my hands than I do now, because I was running obsessively every night at the local Y.  Actually, I guess I had the same amount of time as I do now, except I'm using that time to write these blog posts, which I can do from the comfort of my couch.

When I left to go a-runnin', the kids were already in bed, and the Absent-Minded Professor was mumbling something about not feeling well.  I suggested he sleep in the guest room and keep his cooties to himself.  I went to the gym and ran 10K on a treadmill, a feat I have never been able to repeat.  I hit one of those runner's highs people talk about and I just. kept. running.

I got home and was like, yay me!  I'm all sporty and stuff.  Until about 11 p.m., when I heard a plaintive call from Cookie.  By the time I got upstairs, it was too late.  Her bed was now Vomit City.  To her credit, she had managed to push most of her extensive menagerie of stuffed animals out of the way, but some of those Beanie Babies were hit and were unable to be saved.

Now, my twins are fraternal.  They are not the same height, they have different color eyes, and very different personalities.  But they always vomit within 60 seconds of each other.  They would probably hate for me to tell you that, because they're not really into the whole twin thing so much.  If they accidentally dress alike, one of them will change.  So they probably find their special Twin Vomit Connection really annoying.  But it's true.  They'll probably be those twins that vomit at the same time as adults, even when they're miles apart.  So before I even got Cookie cleaned up, I ran to get a waste basket for the Pork Lo Maniac.

Alas, once again, I was too late.  I was now faced with two moaning little girls in the Bunkbed from Hell.  It looked like an exorcism had taken place.  I changed their sheets, left bowls next to their heads, and put the old sheets in the wash.  As I went up and down all the stairs, I noticed that my fabulous run was causing all my joints to ache and my thigh muscles to lock up.

Over the next 48 hours, every member of my family got sick except me.  I washed endless amounts of laundry.  I sprayed Lysol constantly.  I got to a point where I thought, yeah, I'm just going to have to burn the house down to kill these germs.  I didn't, because I didn't have the energy to go down to the basement again to look for some sort of flammable liquid.  Also, my whole body still hurt from my damn runner's high-induced fiesta at the gym. 

Instead of burning down the house, I swabbed the place with bleach.  Bleach is one of my favorite things ever.  It's almost as great as Diet Coke.  Bleach makes me feel like I have a shred of control over my life.  If Yankee Candle made a "Chlorine Morning" scent, I would buy the whole line, including the "car jars."  In a perfect world, even my car would smell like bleach.  That would be heaven.

Eventually, my family got better.  Many, many Beanie Babies were lost in the Valentine's Day Massacre.  Also, the kids had to miss their Valentine parties at school, which was devastating.  At some point, the Peanut Butter Kid asked me why I never got sick.

"I don't know," I said.  I was really careful about washing my hands a lot.  Maybe I sweated out the germs at the gym.  Or maybe I just got lucky."

Six months passed.

Apropos of nothing, the Peanut Butter Kid welcomed some friends into our home for a playdate with the announcement, "I want to get lucky like Mommy did on Valentine's Day."