There are a few basic parenting truths for when your kids have the flu. For example, puke will only go on the bed and carpet. Also, you'll run out of vodka.
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Top 10 Parenting Truths When Your Kid Has the Flu

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There are a few basic parenting truths for when your kids have the flu. For example, puke will only go on the bed and carpet. Also, you'll run out of vodka.

By Jaycee Kemp

Flu season is here and like many parents, I feel like I am playing the NoroVirus lottery whenever I send my kids out of the house. Life is all smooth sailing and then someone gets sick. At the first sniffle, Mama Bear instinct kicks in and I stop everything to coddle and hug, make homemade chicken soup and wipe noses without hesitation.

And then Day 2.

I turn into Harvey Keitel cleaning up seven different kinds of body fluid, throwing garbage bags full of soaked towels into the trunk of my car to be tossed anonymously in the dead of night into a landfill. I try to leave no trace of illness anywhere because God forbid anyone else get sick. For weeks I aimlessly roam the house with a can of Lysol. I am a shut in–unshowered in my robe, delirious from lack of sleep and confused over the fact that I am not the one sick. I throw away the chicken soup no one ate. And then just as one kid feels better enough to stop whining, the next one goes down. I feel like dead-mom-walking just waiting for my turn in line for the pain train.

Since my child won’t let me be more than three feet away from him at any given moment, I have had the time to compile this list of parenting truths you should know about caring for your sick kid:

TOP 10 PARENTING TRUTHS WHEN YOUR KID HAS THE FLU

1. Playing “race for the vomit” with the dog with the sincere hope you come in 1st place.

2. Brief periods of nighttime sleep let you go into REM just long enough to give you some whacked out sleep paralysis dreams, thus making your caretaking wholly unsettled the rest of the day.

3. Getting to hear the verbal perseveration of your name every 6 seconds until you finally say “what?!” Though you won’t get an answer, you will get up to 2 minutes of blissful silence.

4. Apparently, there are only 2 places to puke. The bed or the carpet. Both are conveniently absorbent.

5. It is possible your kid is keeping score of how many times he can cough or sneeze directly in your face.  He gets double points if your mouth is open.

6. It is a great time to cut back on drinking because you will definitely run out of vodka.

7. You will get to break out the expensive, fancy smelling candles to mask the air only to realize it’s not the air that needs freshening.

8. You will need to develop strategic action plans to stealthily leave the room if you have to go to the bathroom.

9. Making a mental note of everything that got licked to sanitize later.

10. All the hugging, laundry, mopping up serve as an excellent distraction to the state of the world, which you wonder if you will ever get to be part of again.

Influenza A and B were reported to have reached “epidemic” levels this week. To those of you who are home this week, I raise my shot glass of cough syrup to you and say good luck and may good health shine upon you soon.

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About the Author

Jaycee Kemp is a social worker raising two perfect kids in an imperfect world. When she is not busy being educated about life by them, she likes to take what she has learned and tell folks all about it through time consuming things like TEDx talks, book-writing and blogging. Jaycee been featured on The Mighty, Sammiches and Psych Meds, BLUNTmoms, Break the Parenting Mold and her own corner of the internet at Running Through Water. You can also find her way more than you should on social media on Facebook and on Twitter.