"You're Throwing Off my Groove!"

Fourteen months! My kids haven't been sick in fourteen months. Nothing more than low grade, teething related fevers or gummy worm induced stomach aches (thank you Papa). Then, one innocent afternoon of paci' swapping with some other kid and BAM! Here we are: a snotty, hacking mess. All three of them are running fevers, barking like seals and drowning in mucus. And just for the record, I don't feel too great myself. Granted, that other kid, THE HOST, as I like to refer to whomever has made my kids sick, really didn't look sick last week when they were all playing. So that is some comfort, as my pet peeve of the world is people parading around sick kids. There was one such child at church a while back. The family has moved on, taking their germs with them, but this kid! OMG! This kid had every infectious disease known to the continental US. You'd get around that kid and you could just feel the microbes creeping toward your orifices! It didn't help that the kid's mother was holding the kid in your face saying things like, "She looks bad don't she? We was in the emergency room till three this morning. Her temperature got up to 104. Doctor says she's got some kind of stomach flu." The kid starts gagging a little, and as you are discreetly inching your way toward the nursery exit you meekly ask, "Do you think you should really have her out?" "Oh, well you know" the mother says, "this stuff is gonna go around one way or the other." I quietly cursed the mother three days later as I moaned on the bathroom floor with my own version of her tot's viral masterpiece.