How to tell that your child isn’t a heartless monster

When you’re the parent to toddlers and other small people you invite all manner of other small things home too. Your tired immune system saw these microbes, virus’, protozoa and such years ago when you where their age.  In the mind’s eye of your child the virus may have a funny cartoon shape, kind of like a doll that was found on the island of misfit toys.   Our recent battle with these subprime particles cast doubt upon the humanity of our children.  Thankfully it was restored the next day in a hidden gesture that they did weeks ago to other people.

Charlie was sick.  He was vomiting a couple times a night and it was a horrible display of said doll shaped virus, wrecking havoc to his system and to our sleep patterns.  It was a testament to how sick he was that there was no regard being paid to his beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pillow that he carries everywhere.   That last bit is important, remember that.

Three days passed and everything was normal.  Nobody else had gotten sick.  Our preliminary bleach clean had done the trick.  Parenting victory-suck it protozoa!

Then the night of the third day I didn’t feel well at all.  My wife felt OK, but I suspect that she knew I was going to get sick.  Just in case it happened she put the small trash can at the foot of the guest bed where I resigned myself to sleep.

My neighbors turned off their television around 4:00 AM.  I know that because I was in and out of the bathroom for three hours.  However, the small white trash can was not sullied, so I crept back to the bed of exile to sleep it off.

I woke to an all too energetic 5 year old pushing on my stomach telling me that mommy got sick.  That’s impossible, I thought.  I got sick last night.  It turns out that it was a busy night for the virus in our house as both parents were struck down.

Hint to potentially sick parents:  try to get sick at night.  My experience was bad, but my wife’s was worse.

The only thing that could make getting sick worse is having a 3 and 5 year old trip over your ankles while your face is in the toilet due to their vulnerable immune systems and dirty hands.  While she was sick, literally, in the act of getting sick they were both beside her looking at her.  Our oldest asked, “mommy, can I get a cookie”?

The youngest looked at her in a confused way, trying to figure out what was going on and why all of his newly cleaned sheets were in the floor of our bedroom.  “Mommy can I have my grabber”, our oldest asked on the way down stairs. Yes, our oldest son asked for a grabber for Christmas.

This is a high quality professional grade grabber.  My father who is almost 80 doesn’t have a grabber of this quality.  Our son took his geriatric assistance grabber to show and tell this week, much to the delight of the over 60 crowd at the preschool who were apparently trying to trade him various things for it.

So my wife and two sons crept downstairs where she promptly fell asleep on the sofa, right beside our youngest.  Shortly after the nap he realized that mom had fallen asleep on his blanket and pillow.  Nothing like the vengeful anger of a 3 year old who realizes that mom’s face is on his blanket.  He promptly rips the blanket from the sofa, waking mom, who was reminded of how bad she really felt.

It was this time that I walked in, feeling like a bad case of death eating a moon pie.  We tried to have movie day with the kids, but they were pushing, yelling and being children.  Early in the afternoon we called off the festivities and sent them to bed for a 20 minute time out.

Our children are heartless monsters.  They don’t care how we feel.  They don’t care about us.  They asked about cookies when we were getting sick-cookies!  Granted, there is some deep irony in the fact that he asked while she was losing her cookies if he could have a cookie.  However, I suspect that his level of observational humor isn’t to this depth yet.

Two days later I was dropping off Jake at preschool.  He zipped out of the car; then came running back to get a pack of red, stocking shaped things from the car door that I hadn’t noticed before now.  I rolled down the window and asked the adult who was walking him, ‘what was that?’  He leaned over and told her that it was some Christmas stockings that he had made for his friends at school.

Well that was just the sweetest thing.  He made these crafts over the Christmas break, hid them in the car for more than a week and then gave them to his friends.  A. It’s good that we didn’t finally clean the care and B. It proves that our son, at least one of them, isn’t a heartless monster, to others.