Illness Arrives, Chaos Ensues

I knew we couldn't dodge the bullet forever.

Our twin girls have managed to go for nineteen months now without an illness worse than a mild case of the sniffles.  I've always attributed this to my particularly robust genes.  It may also have something to do with the fact that they have never been in daycare and are a bit standoffish during playdates, so don't come in close contact with many little purveyors of pestilence.

My smugness has now been replaced with abject despair though, as a series of insidious viruses have infiltrated our perimeter and made our (more or less) orderly homelife resemble nothing so much as medieval plague art.

I won't bore you with the details of the epidemiology, but I'm pretty sure my goody-goody wife brought the pernicious vapors home from the community clinic where she takes care of sick people.  

The girls have presented almost completely different combinations of symptoms, which I can no longer accurately ascribe each to their respective child.  I just know that for the past week, one or the other has been gushing face-hole fluids, emitting raspy screams as if through a kazoo, running temperatures that turn their heads into glowing embers, and hacking like Amy Winehouse as she lights up her first cig of the day.

And as if that weren't enough, I have now been brought low by this affliction.  I of course put on a brave face for the wife and kids, stoically suppressing my symptoms with quiet dignity; but I assure you, it's more suffering than most men could tolerate.

But the physical symptoms are the least of my worries.  I'm afraid that the social disarray this epidemic has wrought will reverberate for years to come.

Sleep schedules have been violated.  Naptimes have been extended, truncated, or shuffled around to compensate for disruptions in nighttime sleep.  The twins have always been in sync as far as sleep, and to see them napping in shifts is to witness the beginning of the disintegration of the structures that hold our little fiefdom together.  When naps get out of sync, meals have to be staggered.  Pretty soon, we'll be making six separate meals each day for these sickly little tyrants.

Also, our parenting standards have fallen into decline.  We used to be strong in the face of unreasonable demands or over-the-top expressions of displeasure.  We used calm, firm resolve to dissuade the kids from inappropriate behaviors that might lead to more serious problems in the future, or give them the idea that they could do whatever they wanted.  "I'm sorry," we might say, "but you must wear your bib when you eat yogurt."  And then we would re-direct their attention to minimize the backlash.  There were some tears, sure, but we were laying a foundation for a healthy family dynamic.

All that has gone out the window in this new era of infirmity.  The children are very delicate now, and a firm tone of voice, or the confiscation of a choking hazard they have taken a liking to, or a refusal to a demand of "uppy,"  could result not just in tears, but in coughing, choking, gasping, and scattershot snot-rocket salvos.  

So if you were to visit our home at lunchtime today (bring your own hazmat suit), you might find one child sitting on the kitchen counter, being fed cookies as an entree, while the other one sits at her booster seat, throwing refrigerator magnets in her soup.

The true sign of the collapse of our standards, though, is the use of TV as a children's sedative.  We haven't owned a TV for ten years now, and although we'll probably let the kids watch shows online once they're old enough, we haven't been in a rush to introduce them to kids' programming.  Not that we're the kind of holier-than-though hippies that look down our noses at people who watch TV or let their kids watch.  You just go ahead.  I'm sure there's nothing more worthwhile you could do with your time.  We're just following the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is that kids shouldn't watch TV before age two.

So I'm not sure how it happened, but yesterday morning at about 6:30, after a sleepless night of chills, sweats, and coughing fits, I found myself on the couch with a snotty baby on my lap, watching Yo Gabba Gabba on the computer.  We passed a pleasant hour like that, neither of us seeming overly concerned with our physical maladies.

Then later in the day, when one of the girls was having an extended crying/coughing/spewing jag that didn't respond to the usual treatments, I plopped the twins in front of the laptop and faded in and out of consciousness as they stared at the creatures flapping around on screen.

Although I feel like I could really use a morphine drip right about now, I'm pretty sure we'll all recover from this bug pretty soon, and with minimal medical intervention.  However, now that the kids know what narcotic pleasures the Nick Jr. website holds, and that they can have cookies for lunch if they refuse to eat anything else, I'm afraid it will be tricky to get those proverbial genies back in their bottles.