The Sick Kids

It's amazing how much tiny sick dependents can eat up your day. The kids are 7.5, 3.5 and 1.5 (give or take a 0.2 here and there).

7.5 needs constant conversational attention.

• What are we going to do tomorrow?
  
• How was work?
  
• Do you want to play a board game?
  
• What makes wind?
  
• Why is the baby sick?
  
• Where's my socks?
  
• I NEED SOCKS!
  
• When's science camp?
  

3.5 needs constant stimulation attention.

• Get me paper and a pen!
  
• I wanna watch Treehouse!
  
• I need juice!
  
• Where's my crayons?
  
• I need my doll!
  
• I'm pretty!
  
• I want a ponytail!
  

1.5 is an unmitigated engine of destruction.

• She dumps soup into her sister's cereal.
  
• She draws on the wall.
  
• She unplugs the computer peripherals.
  
• She knocks over chairs.
  
• She opens every drawer.
  
• She 'sorts' the clean laundry onto the floor.
  
• She jumps off the couch.
  
• Backwards.
  
• While you're cleaning the crayon off the wall.
  

From 5pm when I get home until 10:30 at night, it's 110% dealing with them. After they're all in bed, I have to clean so they can mess the place up the next day. Then I'm exhausted, and crawl into bed, just in time to not get enough sleep so I can do it all again the next day.

But when they're sick, it's aggravated considerably more. They go to bed later, they wake up in the middle of the night, and they get up earlier in the morning. Somehow, they've found a way to invent an extra hour of the day, and fill it with work.

Thus ends my list of First World Woes. I need to go take a nap.

Wow, the worst was, by a long shot, still yet to come after I wrote that! Whew.