Sick Day

Being a sick stay at home dad is always interesting. When you have little babies especially. When my wife would get sick while she was breast feeding she could lay there in misery with a baby attached to her boob knowing that she was passing antibodies onto the cheerily flopping infant. When I got sick, I had to hold the baby just as close for feeding, but I wasn't doing anything as positive. The best I could hope for was to kiss my wife as much as possible so that she maybe she would get sick before the baby and pass on the antibodies so that I wouldn't end up with a sick baby. This is a morally reprehensible strategy, I admit, and in the best case scenario I now had a sick wife instead of a sick baby which isn't actually that great. Especially with her giving me evil accusing looks about how I got her sick. With the exception of the baby, there were no winners.

The thermometer does not confirm my illness, clearly it's broken.

It's sort of better now that the kids are older, except that they have wider exposure to illnesses. I have to deal with the illness that are going around two different school systems 20 miles apart. Most of the kids that go to preschool with my youngest have older siblings in a different system than my three older kids. My preschooler is acting as a disease vector connecting two populations. What a trooper. At least when they do get sick they're a bit easier to take care of. It's easier to comfort a 6 year old with Sesame Street and a warm blanket than it is to comfort a nine month old. It just is.
But what about when daddy gets sick? Not much you can do really. Things still need to get done, and you still need to do most of them. Still need to get the kids ready for school, still need to get them there. Still need to feed them. You just can't ignore these things. Where is my wife during this you might ask? Well, I need to be almost dead before I even think about letting her stay home. Forget about asking, that doesn't happen, not my style. She would actually stay home to take care of me long before I'd let her. I need to be stuck on the toilet sick before I can even begin to accept help. She is wonderful and takes over the evening stuff though, which I gladly accept, so I can rest. Bath time turns into daddy is curled into a ball on the couch time, which often looks to the kids like daddy is a trampoline time. Resting is hard.
Whenever I'm sick I think about the good old days at work when I could actually just be sick at home and not go to work. Then I remember that when my wife is sick and she stays home, she does that with me and the kids at home. I'll be the first to admit that being at home is often less restful than being at work. I can vividly recall the times when my clearly sick wife has stood in a haze trying to figure out if she'd get more rest at work or at home. It comes down to being nice and trying to reduce infecting her co-workers more than getting actual rest at home. Perhaps it's not so bad being a sick stay at home dad, at least I'll keep telling myself that until I feel better.

Books this week:
The Map That Changed the World, William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology - Simon Winchester
I think this is a book for geologists. Geologists that like the history of geology. That's probably a pretty small audience but for us select few, it's quite a good book. Geology is such a young science that we forget that we didn't even know how to map rocks until William Smith showed us how in 1815. We didn't even know about plate tectonics until after World War II. Considering what a huge economic impact geology has on society through mining and oil exploration, it's astonishing how much we've seemingly just figured out. William Smith was one of those great figurers, and has an interesting story to boot.