In the spirit of walking on the sunny side of the street, looking on the bright side of life, viewing the glass half-full, making lemonade, insert other optimistic cliché here, here is my list of the day:
Benefits of Having Sick Children during the Holiday Season:
1) I don’t have to decide whether or not they are too sick to attend school.
2) No one has much of an appetite, so meal and snack preparation is taking up minimal time and effort.
3) It might be a nasty and evil flu-ish cold, but it’s still just a cold, for goodness’ sake. We are blessed to have healthy children, even when they are ill.
4) Rob is at home all this week, so I have an extra set of hands, very important.
5) I don’t have to tire myself out pulling the sled up the hill so the boys can toboggan, which is a good thing since their contagious little beings have caused me to have the lung capacity of someone in a TB sanatorium.
6) We are sure catching up on our TV watching.
7) Since the sick and exhausted boys are falling asleep before 7 pm, Rob and I are able to watch an entire movie after their bedtime, and still be asleep ourselves before 9:30.
8) When they do recover, I appreciate anew their sunny personalities, which have morphed, due to illness, into something like a cross between a sobbing junior high aged girl who was not asked to dance by the boy she likes, and Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good As It Gets”.
9) The boys actually napped, something that has not occurred in years. When one napped, I had one-on-one time with the other, a rare event.
10) In terms of simplifying my life over the holidays, this is a real winner. Go out or stay in? The choice is out of my hands. When the kids are miserably sick, there is no option but to stay home, stay warm, and snuggle a lot.
Have you been having a nice holiday season? I have, in spite of the constant coughing, occasional vomiting, and omnipresent runny/crusty noses. In fact, I think that all this sickly time together has made our holiday pleasant, strange as that may sound, because of the last item on the list.
Or maybe I’ve just consumed too many extra strength cold medications.
