Aw biscuits…

You know how people are always saying, “Be careful what you wish for?”

Yeah. I’m taking a sick day today.

But, in a twist of unfair that really takes the cake, it’s not because I’m sick enough to take one (I’m downgraded to a mild sore throat, headache, and occasional blast of fever), but because Danger Mouse woke up at 2:00 this morning and threw up all over (all over…sheesh, she’s a tiny little kid, where on earth did all that come from?!) the bathroom. Awesome!

In related news, I find it somewhat amusing how fast my “let’s use the environmentally-friendly, cheap, homemade natural cleansers and this washable towel!” thing vanishes when I am confronted by a nasty, whole-bathroom spray of spew.

Dudes. I went through, I kid you not, half a roll of paper towels and probably a quarter cup of Clorox Clean-Up (which is usually only used around here a dribble at a time when I’m dyeing stuff, to get one or two drops of #37 Blue off the white tile – one bottle will last me for years) in that bathroom this morning.

But between the “ew” factor and the germ-phobia, I did not care. If there were any germs in that astonishingly large volume of ick, they were bleached into oblivion, stuffed into a plastic trash bag that I tied shut as if I thought I had Satan Hisself trapped in there, and tossed into the garbage. And then I washed my hands three times with soap and warm water like I thought I was about to go do open-heart surgery without gloves on or something. (My gloves had holes in the fingers. Germ-admitting holes! Gah!!!)

I even thought about changing my clothes, but decided (after a thorough check for spots) that now I was just being silly.

It’s also amusing to me (from the safety of my relatively germ-free kitchen chair) that my germ-phobia has very little to do with the germs, or even the illness they bring on. Personally, philosophically, I’m definitely in the “germs are a part of the human experience, and it is good that we get minor illnesses and get over them because it makes us stronger – save the antibiotics for the life-threatening [or really painful] crap” camp.

But when it comes to the part where all six of us cycle through each illness once or twice in rapid succession, never any two at the same time so the whole cycle takes, like, a month…I turn germ-phobic real fast.

It’s a tremendous motivator, the idea of being woken up every morning at 2:00 for a month at a stretch because one kid or another – or one of us parents – is (hopefully) kneeling by a toilet (because if we’re not, well, that’s going to be even worse) hurling up things from three months ago and possibly a toenail or two, not to mention all the time lost from work and the fact that all the whining starts to grate on my ears like fingernails on a blackboard until I’m seriously considering divorcing my husband and saddling him with all four of the Denizens so I could run off to Taos to “find myself” in a commune where we live off-grid and grow all our own food and collect all our water using fancy funnel-y things like that show I saw on TV once and oh-oh-oh, could I live in one of those wicked kewl little, what-were-they-called, earth ships?…yeah…that’d be awesome…and as soon as I’m done scrubbing this bleach-soaked roll of paper towel over this manufactured tile, I’m totally going to sign myself up, baby…!

(Why do I have a feeling this is going to be one of those “interesting” weeks…?)