Antibiotics for everyone!

Warning: This post is mildly disgusting. But that's parenthood, so you may as well read anyway.

When you have three children under the age of five, you deal with a LOT of poop. Setting aside personal needs for a moment, that's three bottoms I wipe on a daily basis. For those without children in their lives, allow me to inform you how absolutely fascinating poop is to kids. As my own mother has said, "Of course they like it. It's like play-doh they make themselves." Our son especially seems to have poop issues, and there has been more than one instance we have found it smeared on some surface of the house.

Poop is not the only fascinating thing in the house. Apparently, my face warrants repeated exploring. My infant daughter's current "puzzle of the week" is my nose. She loves grabbing it, biting it, what have you. My older two often mush my cheeks together, pinch my lips, and push my eyes around into funny new shapes to amuse themselves. (Yeah. It's a lot of fun. And let me take a moment here to say how desperately someone needs to invent a sarcasm font.)

For those of you who do have children in your lives, you will know that poop fascination + face touching = pink eye. So when I woke up yesterday morning with my left eye caked closed, I rolled my good eye and immediately called my doctor. I got a prescription for antibiotic eye drops and went back to my life. When I came home from work that evening, I found my highly agitated mother looking for a repairman to come fix the apparently broken AC, an overheated husband, and three sweaty children. At my mom's suggestion, we packed up the kids and took them to the blessedly cool McDonald's down the road, intending to feed them and let them play in the cool air until the AC at home could be fixed. While we were eating, though, I noticed green goo in the corner of my son's eye. Then I noticed that both of my middle daughter's eyes were red, and gunk was starting to build in them too. The baby looked clear, but of course we couldn't trust that. (My husband, it should be noted, is the only one who makes it out of this uninfected, even though, as a stay-at-home dad, he deals with WAY more poop than I do. I hold his glasses responsible for that victory.)

So we bribed them with a milkshake to skip playing, and bundled them off to urgent care. I will skip over the gory details involved in trying to get three children that young simultaneously checked at urgent care while also keeping six hands away from five faces. Sufficed to say all three, the baby included, were prescribed oral antibiotics, and we were sent on our merry, goo-oozing way to the pharmacy. Where, five minutes after urgent care had closed, we found that only two of the prescriptions had actually been sent.

So what's the point, you may ask? Well, I'd like to offer to sell this story to Purell in exchange for a lifetime supply of hand sanitizer. Although I'm sure my kids will find a way around that, and I'll still, inevitably, end up with pink eye. Still, it would make a convincing commercial, wouldn't it?