She used a lot of Kleenex, too

Rachel has a head cold; it's one of those colds where you understand that all you have is a cold, but you feel like death warmed over and your skull weighs a good 50 pounds. All you want to do is lie in bed and wallow in your own misery and whine about how much snot is running out of your stuffed up nose and how watery your eyes are.

Since there's no projectile vomiting involved, we're heartless and cruel parents and while we allow our cold-laden children to lounge in bed all day, we expect them to eat. Hell, we even bring the food to them. Whatever they want, within reason. Rachel wanted nothing more than macaroni and cheese at lunch, so Char made a giant pot of it and they had lunch together sitting on Rachel's bed.

Where Char is, the boys are sure to follow. They all wound up in Rachel's room, in spite of being warned they were going to catch her cold (Alex: I'm pretty sure she sneezed on me yesterday anyway) and when Rachel had eaten all she was going to, Char gathered up the bowls and told Alex and Kevin that their sister needed to get some sleep.

Rachel protested; she wasn't sleepy. She had a couple of chapters left in a book she was reading and wanted to finish it. Fine, she's 14, she knows if she needs a nap or not. Char left the boys in there and we did the dishes, and when I headed down the hall, I could hear Alex's voice rumbling low and peeked in.

They were all on the bed together, Rachel curled up on her side, Kevin at the foot of the bed, and Alex wedged in the middle, and he was reading to them. He looked up when he realized I was there and said, She wanted to finish her book, but her eyes are watering too much.

A couple of hours later they were all piled onto Char's and my bed to watch a DVD. Later, when Rachel was headed for bed and complaining that she was cold, Kevin got up to get an extra blanket for her, and Alex offered to make her some tea.

Once in a while, when the morbid crosses my mind and I contemplate how things would go for them if something happened to both Char and I, I worry that they'll flounder. But then days like this come around, and I know that if the worst does crash into them, they'll take care of each other. The thought made me feel pretty good. But then I started sneezing. And now my head hurts.

I completley blame the little cootie-mongers.