Small children are always sick. Seems like What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One were sick several times a week, if not more. And a cold could rebound between my wife and the boys for half a year. As soon as one of them got well, one of the other ones would share the virus again and it would start up all over again. Typhoid Mary has nothing on this family. Why can’t children share toys as easily as they share germs?
And the fevers! A small boy can go from feeling perfectly fine to having a fever higher than his IQ in less than five minutes. Then a half hour later he wants to go outside and play, the fever is gone and he wants to know if he can have a sandwich!
Not that the boys didn’t really get sick occasionally. The dark angel of projectile vomiting visited our house more than once and both boys got sick enough occasionally that they were like a French submarine; they leaked at every orifice. We had the usual bouts of chicken pox, the galloping galontis and the creeping crud. Thankfully, nothing serious and nothing that stuck.
The sicknesses that I remember the most, however, were the far less serious ones. The ones that happened an hour before the school bus came or when it was someone’s turn to wash the dishes. I work with some people who regularly come down with the brown bottle flu or suddenly need to take a mental health day. These were the kinds of illnesses my boys came down with the most frequently.
Or sometimes, the boys saw the Doc or me take a couple of aspirins and suddenly they needed medicine, too. Within 30 seconds they had developed more symptoms that a convention of hypochondriacs. They were dying!
Luckily, the Doc and I found an all purpose cure for every disease unknown to medical science. I don’t even remember where we found the cure, but I think it was at one of those roadside novelty shops next to a highway. You know, the kind that advertises both gasoline and fireworks for sale. For a dollar, you can go out back of the shop and look at the “Thing” that lives in a cage. Well, sometimes it floats in a big glass jar, but you get the idea.
In the novelty shop, amidst all the genuine Native American kitsch made in China, there was a real treasure: a bottle of candy labeled as fake medicine. A hundred green candy peas in a plastic bottle with a medicine bottle style lid. The perfect all-purpose Wonder Drug!
Now before I tell you the rest of the story, I know what this week’s hate mail will be about. “You should never teach children that medicine is candy!” Oh, shut up! Every damn cough medicine on the market tastes like cherries, I can’t even describe the flavors they put in children’s vitamins. You want to blame someone, blame Mary Poppins. She’s the one who put a spoon full of sugar in the medicine.
The point of the story was that the boys didn’t think those peas were candy, they actually believed that every one of those peas was a powerful drug that combined antibiotics with painkillers and a dash of Pepto Bismol. We told them over and over again it was strong medicine. We kept it in the medicine cabinet and every time we used it, the Doc and I would hold serious conversations in front of them about the proper dosage. Hell, I saw many a sore throat cured with just one pea, if What’s-His-Name wanted two of them, he would have had to cough up a lung.
The peas did perform miraculous cures. The-Other-One once reattached a leg with… no that’s not quite right. But both boys made the school bus fairly regularly. And painfully scraped knees stopped hurting pretty quickly with the right dosage. Of course, any minor injury was much more painful if there was an audience for it.
We still have the bottle. Well, we did. I have previously written about how I suddenly became a grandfather-to-be. This precious child, the Munchkin, now occasionally needs medicine. So I passed the heirloom bottle down to The-Other-One. I have no doubt it will be equally effective for another generation.
And the fevers! A small boy can go from feeling perfectly fine to having a fever higher than his IQ in less than five minutes. Then a half hour later he wants to go outside and play, the fever is gone and he wants to know if he can have a sandwich!
Not that the boys didn’t really get sick occasionally. The dark angel of projectile vomiting visited our house more than once and both boys got sick enough occasionally that they were like a French submarine; they leaked at every orifice. We had the usual bouts of chicken pox, the galloping galontis and the creeping crud. Thankfully, nothing serious and nothing that stuck.
The sicknesses that I remember the most, however, were the far less serious ones. The ones that happened an hour before the school bus came or when it was someone’s turn to wash the dishes. I work with some people who regularly come down with the brown bottle flu or suddenly need to take a mental health day. These were the kinds of illnesses my boys came down with the most frequently.
Or sometimes, the boys saw the Doc or me take a couple of aspirins and suddenly they needed medicine, too. Within 30 seconds they had developed more symptoms that a convention of hypochondriacs. They were dying!
Luckily, the Doc and I found an all purpose cure for every disease unknown to medical science. I don’t even remember where we found the cure, but I think it was at one of those roadside novelty shops next to a highway. You know, the kind that advertises both gasoline and fireworks for sale. For a dollar, you can go out back of the shop and look at the “Thing” that lives in a cage. Well, sometimes it floats in a big glass jar, but you get the idea.
In the novelty shop, amidst all the genuine Native American kitsch made in China, there was a real treasure: a bottle of candy labeled as fake medicine. A hundred green candy peas in a plastic bottle with a medicine bottle style lid. The perfect all-purpose Wonder Drug!
The point of the story was that the boys didn’t think those peas were candy, they actually believed that every one of those peas was a powerful drug that combined antibiotics with painkillers and a dash of Pepto Bismol. We told them over and over again it was strong medicine. We kept it in the medicine cabinet and every time we used it, the Doc and I would hold serious conversations in front of them about the proper dosage. Hell, I saw many a sore throat cured with just one pea, if What’s-His-Name wanted two of them, he would have had to cough up a lung.
The peas did perform miraculous cures. The-Other-One once reattached a leg with… no that’s not quite right. But both boys made the school bus fairly regularly. And painfully scraped knees stopped hurting pretty quickly with the right dosage. Of course, any minor injury was much more painful if there was an audience for it.
We still have the bottle. Well, we did. I have previously written about how I suddenly became a grandfather-to-be. This precious child, the Munchkin, now occasionally needs medicine. So I passed the heirloom bottle down to The-Other-One. I have no doubt it will be equally effective for another generation.
Love this!
ReplyDeleteThank you. I can now reliably report that the peas have not lost their pharmacological effectiveness and continue to perform medical miracles upon the Munchkin.
ReplyDeleteIn the last two years, What's-His-Name and his wife have produced another granddaughter. The Doc and I are searching roadside attractions for another prescription.