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LAURA ON LIFE
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In my family, we never get a cold. We get colds, in the plural. There has never been a time when only one person in my family has had a cold. The winter-time is just one big illness. Every September I stock up on every cold and flu medicine that is available for adults and children alike. The day the kids go back to school is the day that the first cold begins.
I consider myself part owner of the Kleenex corporation because of the mass quantities of this product I have to buy. I always know when we have run out of Kleenex, because there are half-rolls of toilet paper decorating every available flat surface of our house and there is always someone who goes into the bathroom immediately after the last roll was stolen off the dispenser bar.
"Hey, can someone get me some toilet paper!!!!....Is anyone listening?!...I need toilet paper!!"
The unfortunate sh...uh...sitter may sit there for hours until someone finally has the nerve to get it for him. It is particularly hard for me to get toilet paper because most of my family are males. They will usually send my daughter with the required roll, but if she's not home, I can hear them arguing about who's going to save me. Though a bribe of some unhealthy food usually works well with them, I've found.
"The first person who brings me a roll of toilet paper gets a second helping of chocolate cake tonight!" Then comes the negotiation.
"Can I leave it outside the door?" a small voice asks.
"No..If I could get up, I'd have gotten it myself!"
"Can I close my eyes and plug my nose and throw it?"
"Yes, but you only get the chocolate cake if you throw it in the close vicinity of my hands."
"Do I still get it if you drop it?"
"Yes, alright, already, just throw the damn toilet paper!"
Welcome to my world. So, winter-time means a warehouse full of medicines, Kleenex, and disinfectant spray and people sneezing and coughing through every meal, TV show, and car ride. It also means never having enough toilet paper.
I've often wondered why I can't get cough syrup in bulk. Those little tiny bottles of cough syrup don't begin to cover my family's needs. What I need is a gallon-size jug with a squeeze-top lid, so that I can just line them all up and pour it down their throats every four hours.
I have been trying to teach my 4 year old that he needs to cover his mouth when he coughs or sneezes. He's doing well, but his timing is a little off. He coughs or sneezes with joyful abandon, spewing germs hither and yon, and only when he's finished will he cover his mouth with his hand and look at me to see if he did it right. We'll have to work on that.
My 9 year old usually catches a cold first and has it the longest. He then spreads it around to as many people as he can. It's quite possibly the only thing in his life that he's ever willingly shared. He has a tendency to get it in his chest, so there are many nights I can hear him barking and sneezing his head off and I know the next morning that he won't be able to go to school.
After hearing that her brother gets to stay home from school, my daughter figures that if she doesn't do something quick, she'll have to go to school alone. So she'll walk up to me, squinch up her little nose in a single delicate sniff, and announce, "I'm sick." If I look at her skeptically, she'll even scare up a couple of fake coughs to convince me. It never works. I'm a veteran mother.
Laura Snyder may be reached at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com
Or check her website www.lauraonlife.com for archived columns
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2/1/06 |
I once had a Great Uncle that wasn't so great at anything. His name was Great Uncle Ferdie. Everyone in the family knew that you were not to ask Uncle Ferdie to do any task unless you were willing to stand there and watch him because Uncle Ferdie had an unfortunate tendency to "overkill".
If my Great Aunt Lucy asked him to hang a picture, he'd get out his trusty sledgehammer and a 6-inch spike. He wouldn't throw a baseball with you unless he had a baseball cap, regulation-sized baseball and an official baseball bat with Babe Ruth's signature on it. If there was a job to do like taking down a garden shed, my great Uncle Ferdie would rent a bulldozer. He called this "doing it right". Everyone else recognized it as "overkill".
He and Aunt Lucy never had any children. This was probably because they didn't have all the necessary baby supplies. Uncle Ferdie probably couldn't figure out where to put all the stuff it took to raise a child to adulthood. And there was no sense in having one if you didn't have all the stuff.
Uncle Ferdie was not a favorite amongst us kids, but that was not as much due to the tendency toward overkill as it was his habit of squeezing our cheeks so hard that it left bruises. I guess that's a form of overkill, too.
Kids are masters of overkill. I can't tell you how many times my daughter got out expensive stationary to draw a picture. "But, mom, it's gonna be a really good picture…" then sensing that I'm not going to budge she adds,"…And then I'm gonna give it to you so you can hang it up!" Aw, how sweet. My house looks like a half-off sale at a flea market because of all the really good pictures I have hanging up. But for the life of me, I can't figure out how to diplomatically say, "You're not Monet, and the scotch tape from your picture-hanging is taking the paint off the walls." Her little face looks so earnestly to me for reassurance and support for her fledgling talents. Who knows maybe she'll be the next Monet someday and my house with its scotch-taped walls will become a very expensive museum. "…And this is where the artist hung her first drawings…"
Uncle Ferdie would have done it "right", though. He would have framed the little masterpieces and got out his sledgehammer. He was only a relative by marriage, thank goodness, or I might suspect that his genes were passed through to my son. My son only likes milk if he's eating chocolate chip cookies. He won't even have milk in his cereal. When he's eating chocolate chips cookies - not oatmeal, not peanut butter, not sugar cookies - he pours himself a towering glass of milk that inevitably will get a cookie dunked in it once or twice, and then will be left sitting on the table.
"Why didn't you drink the milk in that glass?" I'll ask.
"Mom, you know I don't like milk," he answers quite reasonably.
"Well, then why did you pour such a big glass?"
"I had to pour enough that the cookie could be completely submerged." Yes, this is how my 9 year old speaks.
I tried reasoning with him, "You know, if you only poured an inch or two in a smaller glass, you could have turned the cookie until all of it got milk on it."
He shrugs that off and says, "I know, but I wanted to do it right."
It makes me wonder if there wasn't some hanky-panky going on between great Uncle Ferdie and my grandmother. One day, when my son is older, I'm going to test that theory by asking him to hang a picture.
Laura Snyder may be reached at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com
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