Children and the Ever Present Specter of Disease

If I’ve learned one thing about children over the past thirteen years it’s that you should never eat their leftovers because you won’t be able to go to New York. That’s actually pretty specific but I promise it will make sense in just a bit.

This belief does not come from a place of squeamishness or some high-minded idea that leftovers are beneath me. I love leftovers and tend to keep them well past the date when it would be wise to eat them. In fact I only throw foodstuffs away when they start to look like something that would be better suited for life in an infectious disease lab than, say, one’s refrigerator.

Not eating kid’s leftovers is more of a matter of self-preservation than anything else and this is because kids, no matter what age, are riddled with disease. At any given moment there’s a fairly decent chance that any child in your household is harboring something that will make you want to lie down for three days and not get up. Of course they don’t actually look sick which is part of the problem. Kids will cheerfully bounce around the house with the flu or a cold for a few days while looking as healthy as a horse. The thing is that they’re not. Kids are amazingly good at ignoring symptoms that would put a seemingly healthy adult with a robust immune system out of commission for a week. They’ll bee bop around the house spreading infection all the while until they feel a little off, take a nap and then go on about catching the next new thing in bacteriology.

That is my reason for the rule about leftovers. If a child has even looked at a plate of food I’ve come to realize that it’s always best to immediately toss it out. Unfortunately this is a lesson I have to learn every few years and that is because I am stupid.

A few days ago my daughter was eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese. She’d gotten about halfway through it before she pushed it away and claimed that she wasn’t up for finishing said macaroni and cheese. This rarely happens. My daughter can plow through macaroni and cheese like General Sherman tore through Georgia. In hindsight this should have been my first clue that she wasn’t feeling so hot but, as I may have mentioned, I am stupid.

Before she’d even left the table I’d already picked up her used fork and started shoveling cheesy pasta into my mouth thinking “you know, I haven’t tested my immune system in while.” Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t think anything at all. If I would have been thinking I would have tossed the entire bowl into the trash. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have regretted the decision but it would have been tempered with the knowledge that I may have avoided RSV or whatever in the hell is going around right now.

The very next night my daughter began complaining that she had a sore throat and I began to suspect that I was screwed. She missed school the next day but was pretty much back to her old self by the end of the weekend. I, on the other hand, had started to feel a bit under the weather. At first I told myself that it was probably allergies but, in my heart of hearts, I knew that it was not. By Monday I was laid out with the full accouterments of a late summer cold; the headaches, the post-nasal drip and that constant pressure behind the eyeballs that makes you realize that this is what glaucoma probably feels like.

Now, all of this would have been fine if my family didn’t have plans for the weekend but, as chance would have it, we did. We’d had a trip to New York that had been in the books for a few months and were scheduled to leave this past Friday. It being Monday and, given how quickly my daughter had bounced back into convalescence I thought that I’d be back in peak form by the time we were supposed to shove off. I was wrong.

By Tuesday I figured there was a decent chance that I’d be feeling better by Wednesday and, by Wednesday, I hoped that I’d be up and running by Thursday. Alas, when Thursday came I was still pretty much bedridden and producing an amount of mucus that is rarely seen outside of low-quality horror films. The writing was on the wall and, for the sake of my family’s happiness and well-being, I canceled my flight. I don’t travel well in the best of times and stomping around NYC with a cold would be pushing the boundaries of what I, and my family, could reasonably tolerate.

I suppose that’s how life goes when you can’t keep away from a half-eaten bowl of macaroni and cheese. I don’t like it but I don’t make the rules.

About the Author

derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.