My Poor Little Sick Kid

The kid is sick. AGAIN.

This is illness number 3 for us in a little over a month. She's worn out and we're worn out.

She always gets a cold the week after Halloween. I don't know what it is; we dress her warmly, don't let her stay out the entire 2 hours of tricking and treating allotted in our city, and don't let her eat her weight in candy. But it never fails.

It was no huge shock, then, when the sniffles started over the weekend. I thought things were fine, though, until she had a meltdown over her Honeycombs this morning. She suddenly burst into real, heart-wrenching tears and, when we asked her what in the world was wrong, looked at us with her big doe eyes and said, "I can't breathe through my nose and I feel bad and I don't want to go to school and that makes me sad." Good Lord. No way could I make her go to school after that. I'm not made of stone.

No way could I take a day off work today, either (I had to play the role of Technology Wench for a slew of guest speakers today), so we would have been stuck had Mamaw not come to the rescue. The woman is a saint.

Hopefully the tears and the snot will be dried up by tomorrow and we can get her back to school. As much as I believe kids should stay home when they're sick, it kills me to keep her at home because of the unbelievable amount of make-up work she will have to do. We'll spend all weekend filling in letter-writing practice sheets, matching shapes, sorting things by color, and, or course, coloring. Add to that the "Family Turkey Project" we already had for homework this weekend (we, as a family, have to "adopt" a paper turkey and decorate him and name him and enter him into a contest against the other kindergarten families, most of whom I wager will care a lot more about this assignment than I currently do.) And the little darling gets to do a class act in her school's presentation of School House Rock Jr. on Sunday.

If it weren't for the annual Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Wines and Beers of the World festival Saturday, I think I, too, would be falling apart over my breakfast cereal.