Sick Bed

I had the WORST case of flu I’ve ever had this last couple weeks. I am just getting over it.

Of course, I got it from the school kids. E gave it to me, I gave it to Bigglest Boy, then Littlest Boy. Middlest Boy only got sniffles. Monsieur, damn him, didn’t get anything. He never gets sick. I was hating on him so badly last week, laying in bed, coughing up my lungs between runs for the bathroom. He was all chipper and concerned at the same time. I asked him why he never even got a hangnail, and he said, “Don’t you remember? I had a strained back just two weeks ago!”

Oh, right, I thought, I stand corrected.

Monsieur’s maternal grandfather is still alive at age 96. His maternal grandmother probably would have lived as long, but died from complications from a car accident that she was in at age 84.

“Why don’t you ever get sick?” I asked him.

“I’m not sure that I know,” he replied. “I eat well and I work on my feet every day or so.”

“How would you define ‘eating well’?” I asked.

“Well, about food choices, it’s pretty simple: Eat food. Don’t eat very much food. And don’t eat very much of your food as milk.”

“What do you mean by ‘eat food’?” I asked. “Everyone eats food.”

“Food,” he said, pulling up a chair and sitting down, “means things close to how they were when growing. Don’t cook the vegetables too much. Don’t refine the grains and sugars too much. For example, white flour and polished rice are not really food. They may taste good, but they’re not food. Not any more.”

“I pretty much eat what you eat,” I pointed out.

“Yes, you do, and you exercise often and you stay active,” he agreed.

“So why do I get sick and you don’t?” I whined.

“I honestly cannot tell you,” he admitted.

I grumbled, turning over and putting my face into the pillow.

Quote of the Week

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater. -Gail Godwin

Do I?

When we got home today the boys, who had been so good I thought they might have been abducted and replaced by alien doubles, so as to better study our life forms. They were so good that they were allowed the supreme privilege of watching a movie on a school night, and I had checked out Bedknobs and Broomsticks from the city library. I love that movie, not just because it has a pre-Murder She Wrote Angela Lansbury doing musical numbers as only she could do (didja know she did musical theatre? well, I did).

Middlest Boy didn’t want that to be the movie. “It’s a grown-up movie,” he complained. “It’s going to be scary. I don’t want to see anything scary.”

“It’s not scary,” I assured him. “Look – it’s got a magical island of cartoon animals, and they play soccer. You like soccer.”

He was convinced, finally, and he watched it along with the other two boys.

Treguna… makoides… trecorum… satis dee. I really did want to watch it, actually, but right at about the time that the Wermacht invaded Pepperidge Eye I nodded off.

“Pepper, hush!” Middlest Boy said, startling me.

“Wha-huh?” I snapped awake, wiping the drool from my mouth.

“You were snoring,” he said. “And you were wrong. It is scary. There’s ghosts!”

“Ghosts?” I looked at the TV. Armored knights without bodies were routing the Germans as disembodied bagpipes played on the crest of a hill. I held Middlest Boy in my lap. “Do I really snore?” I asked him quietly.

“Yes!” all three boys said in unison.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be quiet now.”

The Viking and Highlander costumes resisted the German beachhead, and the Empire was safe.

After helping to put the children to bed, I asked Monsieur, “Do I ever snore?”

He looked cornered.

“Seriously, I just want to know,” I assured him.

“I – cannot remember any instance of you ever doing so,” he managed to say.