Rhinovirus Rantings

I am oozing and post-nasal-dripping my way through this week's post. Last Thursday, every child in my house collapsed with a fever within the space of four hours and by Saturday afternoon, I realized that I had either been unknowingly hit by an invisible truck, or I was doomed also. So, I am going to briefly babble incoherently about being sick with minions and then...be sick with my minions.

So my aspirations as an amateur neo-classical interior designer are being overthrown by a strange combination of vapo-spewing, meets lotion-tissue, meets white sale vomited on the floor, meets essential oil bottles, accented with the occasional sticky squirty syringe and topped with a fashionable colorful thermomenter chic. I am renaming it Phlegm Eclectic.

This particularly violent virus came with an unrelenting fever that has had to be vigilantly monitored day and night. This means that my normally cluttered living room became carpeted in a mine field of little bodies. What is worse is that each little body is enshrouded in the complete camouflage of character-adorned bedding, so with each step comes the threat of causing serious bodily injury. Currently, crossing my living room is more perilous than crossing Death Valley. It is like some sort of sadistic game of Twister to walk across my living room this weekend. Right foot on Batman blanket (SQUEAL), nope lose 10 points. Left foot on Tinker Bell pillow, (OUCH!) advance immediately to right hand on yellow bean bag and left hand on treasured square of clear floor in a maneuver closely resembling a game of London Bridges, complete with the falling down part.

The worst part is that I inadvertently shared this viral gift from the gods with my charitable friends, who so kindly invited my disease-ridden offspring to play while I did the mandatory three-hour pilgrimage to ballet class. When I was a young mother with only two minions to train in world domination, I agreed to kindly watch the son of a family in our neighborhood who were in desperate need of a babysitter for their toddler son. At least every other week, the lady would deposit her son at my house with a flimsy excuse as to why his nose was bejeweled in green crust, or why he was covered in little blistery spots, or why he was bleeding from his eyeballs. Having not yet grown the spine and bitch switch that comes with the birth of a third of fourth minion, I would smile and take the infant into my home, not knowing that he was actually a means of biological warfare. My husband one day proposed that perhaps this child wasn't a child at all, but instead a little “Ebola monkey.” I scolded him through my pink-eye, while I slathered lotions on the kids' chickenpox. The nomenclature stuck however, and I swore that I would never be the mother of little carrier monkeys. So imagine my dismay when I retrieve four little boys all docile and snuggling in blankets on my friends' couch. It sounds benign, but if you know my kids, it is eery and ominous.

When my children are sick, the mass occupation of my sleeping space accelerates rapidly. I tried to set up a make-shift hospital ward in my living room. Each child assigned to their own color of bean bag and hidden under their own blanket, and me perched on the couch to oversee the administration of treatments. It sounded like a good idea at the time and saved a fortune on buying humidifiers for each room of the house, but what has ended up happening is EIGHT people puppy-piled on ONE couch. Add the radiating fevers, and I was ready to turn on the air conditioning in the middle of snow-crusted January. When the virus finally hit me, I wasn't sure if the muscle aches were from two nights of sleeping under approximately 300 lbs of children, or if it was actually the microscopic organisms succeeding in their attack.

I have also noticed through years of mucousy observations, that the minions get better approximately 12 to 24 hours before I am completely down for the count. (My afflictions also lasted a minimum of three times longer than theirs also, but that may be in inverse proportion to the amount of time I get to moan and sleep it off.) My four-year-old is the master of creating mischief—it glimmers in his lavender/blue eyes. Some people mistake his dimpled grin for a congenial and innocent smile, but it is truly just him imagining your face when he has achieved his planned level of chaos. Today alone while Daddy slumbered and I snorted and dripped through the basic routines of normalcy, he finger painted in numerous bathroom substances, he used the lotion-filled tissue as confetti, he robbed two piggy banks, unrolled an entire roll of toilet paper, raided the fridge and pantry, changed the password for the school laptop, stole two MP3 players and one set of earbuds, tied one of my balls of yarn to the cat, and systematically poured an entire pitcher of water on the kitchen floor through a series of tunnels and straws that managed to dampen every dining room chair. All the while, I am wiping my cherry nose, begging in a voice that is reminiscent of Droopy Dog, and chasing him in what seemed to be slow motion.

Which begs the question: what idiot decided that it was GOOD thing to make children's cold medicine NON-drowsy? I am completely flummoxed by a human being that thought that oozy, ornery, little mucous factories who are alert and running around touching and licking everything was a prime marketing point. I think that the ideal and most intelligent thing would have been to advertise that a medicine was EXTRA-drowsy. With all six monsters down at the same time, I want a medicine that has Snow-White-mythical-deathlike-coma-inducing cough medicine. Somehow, I don't think that is on the market, but it should be.

The worst part of being sick as a mother isn't nursing the children, it is nursing a husband. My husband is a burly and brooding sort anyway. A good friend calls him one of the “burnt marshmallows” of the matrimonial world. He is bitter, black and crispy on the outside, but that masks a creamy sweet inner layer. But that sticky layer sweetness is nearly non-existent when the slightest amount of prolonged viral discomfort is involved. My husband has an amazing immune system in that it only allows invaders exactly 24 hours after I am afflicted. Literally, when I get sick, I am on a tight schedule. I have ONE day to get from the onset of aches and pains to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed again. Right now it is 7 p.m., and I am trying to smile and breathe through my gritted teeth, (the breathing part is because it is an impossible feat to accomplish through my nasal passages) because the children (being slightly recovered from their afflictions, therefore not sick enough to be immobile, but not well enough to be congenial, self-controlled, and/or diplomatic) are doing some sort of combination of climbing the walls and arguing at obscene decibel levels. And where is the hubby? Snoring in the middle of the mayhem, while I try to direct traffic around his slumbering corpse.

Well, my moments of semi-lucidity have passed. I am going to go seek out the medicines with the highest advertised possibility of drowsiness and collapse under a pile of minions.