You might feel the need to Lysol your computer monitor after all the H1N1 posts I've been putting up this week...

It must be some type of cosmic joke that after spending so much time wrestling with the H1N1 vaccine question and writing about it yesterday, I would come down with the flu.

THE flu.

All those people who joke that H1N1 is nothing? They're wrong. It's a pretty cruddy thing to happen, in my opinion, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I was completely unprepared for how quickly it would knock me off my feet. T. first got sick on Saturday, and by Monday morning I was feeling that ominous tickling in my throat, and achy body sensations, and throbbing headache. By Monday night, when I dragged myself to bed I was shaking so much from the chills I couldn't even hold my tooth brush. My teeth were knocking together so loudly Scott heard them from downstairs.

My one word of advice to anyone out there with kids: if one member of your household gets sick with this flu, batten the hatches and go into survival mode--stockpile Kleenex, Lysol, orange juice, cans of soup, vitamin C. I was caught woefully unprepared on Tuesday. No sooner had Scott and L. left for school/work, and T. and I had settled onto the couch to listen to a book on CD (she's still running a low-grade fever), when I realized that we didn't have a drop of orange juice in the house, or any cans of soup, or, in fact, any juice of any kind, and I was left with a still-sick-but-not-sick-enough-to-sleep five-year old and I felt miserable.

I cried a little into my tissues.

I felt sorry for myself.

But in the end there's not much you can do but wait it out and be the grown-up. Luckily for me I did have T., because who else would feed me dribbles of water out of a plastic tea set, and read me Pigeon Wants a Puppy ten times over, and bring me a blanket for my toes?