The common cold is ravaging my house.  It’s such a butt.  When it hits, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop ‘the drippy nose.’  It drips and drips until you’re left wondering where on Earth all this snot is coming from.  It leaves you, boxes of Kleenex (more like cases!) later, to the next stage of clogged head, watery eyes, popping ears, scratchy throat…and bundles of other miserable symptoms.

I don’t know about you, but the second a cold begins I attempt to bomb it with every kind of OTC and home remedy I can muster up. (Oh, if there were only a way to call in sick from being ‘Mom.’)  But for my kids, who aren’t old enough to partake in the glories of NyQuil at bedtime when sick, they just have to wander around in a drippy nosed daze…wreaking of Baby Vapor Rub.

My oldest, Brianne, is the household’s latest cold victim.  The fact that she complains and whines about every major, minor, and barely existent pain and symptom makes it hard to diagnose an actual sickness.  (Just a tad dramatic…definitely mine.)  The day she caught the cold, she’d eaten breakfast and only blown her nose a couple times before school, so I figured we were good to go.  Coincidentally, I got the sudden urge to scour my house while she was at school.  (Every once in a while my urge to clean and straighten completely takes over.) As I rushed to pick her up after the last floor had been mopped, I thought I had successfully cleaned the germ right out of my house.

One look at my poor little girl as I walked down the hallway towards her classroom to pick her up and I knew…the drippy nose had struck again.   The raw, red skin underneath her nose was the dead giveaway, on top of assurance from her teachers that her nose had been running like a hose all morning long.  She took the entire flight of stairs down looking straight up at the ceiling, but it was no match for ‘the drippy nose.’  Clear snot ran down her face so fast she couldn’t even wipe it before it hit her mouth.  Ugh.  A disinfecting nightmare.

Brianne trudged, sneezing, out of the van and into the house to eat her lunch, then put her Tinkerbell nightgown on and began the snuggles.  Seeing as she cannot force herself to use a Kleenex for more than one wipe, we were down a whole box by mid-afternoon.  Not able to get comfortable enough to sleep in between sneezes, she par-oozed through a gazillion books all afternoon, switching gears only to come out for a huge bowl of chocolate ice cream.  (Who’s going to deny a sick kid ice cream?  Not this mom.)

Clear slime oozing out of her nose, all the girl wanted to do was take advantage of every extra privilege being sick earned her.  That (for me) meant lots of extra hugs, multiple trash-can-full-of-Kleenex empties, and watching her favorite two movies…Silly Songs Veggie Tales and The Nightmare Before Christmas (or as she calls it, ‘Skeleton Jack’.)

Oh, to be a kid again.  When it really wasn’t all that bad to be sick sometimes.  I mean, not the actual sick part, but the special treatment was awesome.  I remember happily settling in for a day home sick from school (I got strep throat a lot so I eventually had my ‘sick day’ down to a science.)… I was allowed to have TV in my room, my mom made me chicken noodle soup and home-made jello and pudding, and I did my homework in the comfort of my room rather than a stiff desk at school.

I’ve been blessed with healthy kids, and am really thankful for that.  REALLY thankful.  It’s nothing I take lightly.  Besides getting colds they’ve been pretty low maintenance.  So, it’s no biggie to answer the call of duty when they need to be nursed back to health.  I’m just thankful that’s all I’ve been handed to deal with thus far.  When my kids spring back to normal after their sickness is gone, I get all kinds of thank you’s and hugs…ha ha ha!  No, I don’t.  I get sick.  Whatever they had attacks me…and then moves on to my husband.

Blast you, drippy nose.  Where’s my mop and disinfectant spray….

Happy Dripping.

Megs