Flus, Balloons and Homecoming Breakfast

Blogs pause, but life rarely does.
How to catch up?

Homecoming dances and choir concerts, soccer tournaments and family visits, lots of work, a good thing. Balloon Boy, a bad thing. An evil germ this week that had me searching a website on “Common Cold vs. Swine Flu – How to Tell the Difference.”

An entire website inviting me to analyze my every symptom? I mean, what could be better? My family wouldn’t do it with me, which annoyed me greatly; my husband Rick’s response to my every sickness from runny nose to coma, “You’re fine.” But it would be fun for me, give me something to do to distract me from my suffering.

Fever is rare with a cold but usually present with flu, it told me. I reached 100.0 once in the middle of the night on the little plastic digital thermometer we were forced to buy when I dropped the good one and had the fire dept. out to scoop up the mercury (another day, another blog).  So that’s pretty bad, and surely that cheap thermometer was wrong and I was much sicker.

Next I analyzed my cough – productive or non-productive? We’ll move on as even I did not wish to ponder this.
Aches – slight with cold, severe with flu. Moderate, I decided, and possibly due to my ‘Y’ class but I’m no doctor, they could have been severe.
I definitely had chills, which are flu-like. Sixty percent of people with chills have the flu, it read. Sixty percent, wow. I didn’t like my odds, I told my daughter, who ignored me.
Tiredness – mild with a cold, mild to severe with the flu. Come on. That’s a gimmee. Of course, I’m exhausted.

Headache, check. Rapid onset, check. Sore throat, check. Oh wait, that’s for a cold. Very confusing. Chest discomfort? If I coughed hard enough.
Turns out Rick was right, after one day of mild suffering and one day of major suffering, I was pretty darned close to fine, even I have to admit.

I’m thinking my resistance was low due to Homecoming, even though I didn’t actually go. But if you don’t think that watching your firstborn child get dressed up for her first formal dance, ask her date’s mother to pin a boutonniere on her son’s lapel, and then board a bus last used by strippers at a bachelor party is not heart-wrenching, you’ve never done it.

I admit up front that making fun of this is not unlike when journalists criticize “the media.” I was a willing participant in this extravaganza that would put most proms, wedding weekends and coronations to shame.

I’m pretty sure they went to the Homecoming Dance, although my nephew Daniel participated in his Homecoming festivities without actually going to Homecoming, which I’m told is quite common with upperclassmen too cool to participate in the very occasion they are celebrating.
Amanda, being a freshman, was not too cool. So she and the other girls dressed up – most transforming into 35-year-old women – put on very high heels that made me wince just to look at, and paired off with their dates, most of whom were fortunate enough to come up to the girls’ shoulders.

Then they took pictures (except for Rick and I because our camera was broken), went to dinner, to the dance, to the “after-dance activity,” where they ate again, to girls’ and boys’ sleepovers, where they snacked and visited each other’s houses because they had only been together the last eight hours, and then finally, had a lavish, 12-course breakfast, bringing the grand total of the weekend to the price of a medium-sized, used car.
Kidding. That would be inappropriate and lack all sense of common decency and perspective. It would probably be closer to a small, used car.

But Amanda was happy and after all, that’s the important thing. If your child is happy, you’re happy.

Even when you’re really sick with something that could very well have been a new strain of the flu and no one cares.