A Cup of Tea, A Cookie, and Strep Throat

There's something really special about taking care of a sick loved one - for about the first hour. After that, not so much.


I don't know how nurses do it. (Except for maybe Nurse Ratched.)

Today marks Day #3 for the Dynamite children missing school. My husband played along on Day #1 and stayed home with both kids although he didn't believe either was sick - despite our son's congestion and above-normal temperature and our daughter's wretched, hacking cough.

He says I "overreact" and "exaggerate" things. (Me???)

He also says I'm obsessed with thermometers. (I am, just a little.)

When the neighborhood kids got home from school that day, he invited them inside to play because, as he told their parents, "the kids really aren't sick even though they didn't go to school." He offered the neighbor ladies some homemade cookies that he made (!!!) while all the kids rolled around and drooled on each other (or something like that).

I arrived home that evening around dinner time to find my son, glassy-eyed and flushed, struggling to work his arm into the sleeve of his Cub Scout uniform shirt.

"Um, are you planning to go to a Cub Scout meeting tonight?" I gingerly inquired of my husband. He nodded, and I suggested in the most delicate of ways that perhaps it might be good idea to first take our son's temperature, seeing as he looked, well, SICK.

He was.

On Day #2, I stayed home from work with my feverish son while my non-feverish daughter reluctantly returned to school. "Just go to the nurse if you don't feel well," I had said reassuringly. I always plant this "just go to the nurse" seed, never expecting my kids to actually go to the nurse and yet, curiously enough, never surprised when they do.

At the doctor's office with my son that morning, as we waited for the results of a rapid strep test the doctor was "99.9% certain" would be positive, my cell phone rang. It was the school nurse. "Hello Mrs. Dynamite. I have your daughter here, and she doesn't have a fever but she does have a cough and..."

"I'll be there in a minute."

My streptococcal son and I returned to the doctor's office with my coughing daughter just minutes after we had left. After a quick examination of my daughter and a throat culture, the doctor left the room to complete her rapid strep test. That's when I noticed a red, raised rash spreading across my son's face.

Of course.

The doctor walked back into the examination room and before I had a chance to point out my son's glaring rash, she said, "Your daughter doesn't have strep, but after listening to her lungs, I think she has pneumonia."

"Pneumonia???" I responded incredulously and maybe with just a hint of exaggerated overreaction.

"Yes," the doctor said soberly. "Pneumonia."

At which point my daughter began to cry.

"Is it bad?" she said through choking sobs and deep, barking coughs.

"Well," I replied, "old people die from pneumonia, but you're not going to die or anything."

She started crying louder and coughing harder.

"I mean, it's just that..."

The doctor cut me off by saying to my daughter, "Listen, you're going to be just fine. I'm going to give you some medicine and then you need to rest and relax, OK?"

I nodded at the doctor as my daughter buried her face into my chest, and then me, my swollen-eyed, hacking daughter, and my rashy, feverish son headed off to the pharmacy to further spread our Dynamite germs throughout the land (and get some medicine, a gingerbread house kit, and some candy canes).

Day #2 turned into Day #3 and another day of me desperately trying to "work from home" to a cacophony of Nintendo DS beeping noises, requests for ginger ale, nasty-sounding coughs, and the lure of movies like Horton Hears a Who and High School Musical 1 (the sing-a-long version).

How am I supposed to work with all this singing??? (mine)

And now, as Day #3 comes to a close and my hourly temperature readings of the kids, combined with the coughing, the fevers, and the Rash (so pronounced it now merits a capital R) still require parental attention and no school, I think it's time for me to make a necessary request of my husband - seeing as I really have to get back to work tomorrow.

What do you think? Should it be "Oatmeal Scotchies"?


"Almond Crescents"?


Or Mocha Almond Biscotti?


Other ideas?