The Four O'Clock Flu
When we're this far gone, what's one more day out of school?
“Hey Dad”, she proclaimed at the side of my bed.
I opened one eye to check the time: 7:22. Not too bad, we have an hour until the school bus.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I’m all sniffly”, she told me. “Sniffly?”, I asked. “Yeah, sniffly”, she replied.
That conversation didn’t really clear things up at all, but after some further investigation it seems the child has a bit of a cold and the sniffles.
She went downstairs all bundled up in her fuzzy knee-high socks and matching pink robe and flopped under a blanket on the sofa, while I made coffee and figured out what day it was.
Usually when she does this she’s all chatter and energy after a good night’s sleep and this morning she looked wee bit pale and was pretty quiet so I asked if she was sick.
“I’m medium” she told me.
That didn’t help with the diagnosis much. Then she told me that groundhogs make their own bathrooms underground. I went to get the thermometer to make sure she didn’t have a fever.
No fever. But she just didn’t have any energy to get off the couch so BW called it. She’s staying home.
Great.
I will not tell you how much screen time she had. It was a lot and let’s leave it at that.
Calling out sick is a tricky thing - young or old. Because it’s hard to know just how sick we’re talking about when it comes to having a common cold in February which is pretty…common.
Today we erred on the side of caution because the teacher doesn’t need a snot nosed kid in her class all day and if it did go sideways, we have to go pick her up and bring her home and that’s almost a bigger pain than just keeping her at home.
Later tonight she was asking for a tissue and she asked where and what are boogers?
I’m not a doctor and I may have the details wrong but I explained the bloggers are dirt that your body doesn’t want to go into your lungs and your nose stops it from going that far. 1
She looked up at me with a well-used tissue in her hand and you could see the light bulb in her head light up - and then she says to me:
“So thats why we shouldn’t eat our boogers - they are dirt!”
“Exactly!”, I replied.
Now, go to bed. Tomorrow is a school day for sure.
TH and Co.
I tried.
Love how kids process things in real time like that. The booger revelation is gold. I remembre when my nephew figured out why we wash hands before eating, same lightbulb moment. These small sick days end up being unintentional teaching opportunities wrapped in alot of screen time.
I love her brain!