Tales from the petri dish

I love having a lot of kids - at times, I even think it would be fun to have more - but every winter, we start the round of illness sooner and end it later. Now that there are nine of us in the household going to a total of three schools, one office, and numerous germ-infested activities and stores, I think the CDC or the WHO might want to seriously consider using our house to track the vectors and life cycles of the world's illnesses. We catch everything, and it takes so long for each illness to circulate through the whole family that we've invariably gotten something new with a bang before the old thing has finally gone out with a whimper.

I'm sure you'll all remember how stoically I bore up under the infants' ear infections a couple weeks ago. Then, before the babies had quite finished their antibiotics, the 5 year old got sick, and it turned out to be strep, so he missed three days of school last week. And I really do look stoic next to him. God help his future wife, he is the whiniest sick person ever. So he's on antibiotics, and seems much better since Saturday, but now my poor mother and the three year old have both come down with some stomach plague that I'm really, really hoping I can avoid. Granted, it would kick start the weight loss I'm looking for, but I actually think I might prefer diet and exercise. I had enough vomiting while pregnant with the twins to last me a good long while.

We're supposed to visit my in-laws in South Carolina this week, so I'm crossing my everything that this is the end of this particular round of nastiness. If I weren't utterly exhausted, I would dip everything in the house in lysol, including and especially the children. Little disease-carrying vermin.