I thought we had more time

I've been saying to Ken lately that we have about 5-6 weeks of good health left to our family until virus season hits us full force. With one kid in day care, you bring home a host of unfamiliar germs to make the rounds in your family. With two kids in day care, you are seriously screwed. If we charted out how many people and their germs the kids come in contact with directly and indirectly throughout one day-care day, we'd surely be disgusted, but such is life. We experience the same things at our offices; it's just that the situation is compounded now that our family is bigger.

I am grateful for the day-care center we switched to when Padraic was 14 months since they take germ battling seriously. Henry is still in the infant room, where anyone who enters must wear hospital booties over their shoes so as not to track outside germies onto the very floor where the little ones will be crawling and picking up things to put in their mouths.

And the whole center does a full-on sanitizing every single night. All the crib/cot sheets are washed, and all the toys are cleaned with a bleach solution. Every. Single. Night. A cleaning company does a surface cleaning every night as well, and then every weekend they return for a deep cleaning. Kids with fevers of 100 or higher get sent home within the hour, and they cannot return until they've been feverless for 24hrs. I can only imagine how many more illnesses my family would struggle with throughout the year if it weren't for these precautions. Because even this system isn't perfect protection against getting sick, and we can't wrap the kids in their own bubbles before sending them off into the world.

Anyway, as for the title of this post, which I have digressed from, I thought we had until mid- to late October before we'd all start getting ill, but I was wrong. Henry has just gotten over what we initially thought was a bout of teething w/some yucky diapers ensuing, but turns out it was a stomach virus. You know how I know? I got sick as a dog yesterday afternoon at work, and it's only gotten more interesting in the meantime. So I am at home, sipping tea to get rehydrated, and then I am off to bed. Ugh, ugh, and more ugh. Perhaps it is time to order some bubbles.