No one in this family has an immune system.

We took a family sick day on Tuesday.

Sunday we had been at a Super Bowl party with a dozen other couples and what seemed like THOUSANDS of children under the age of seven, and on Monday Josie texted me to let me know that four of those children had been throwing up.

Whatever it was, it must have been in the not-booze, because no one got sick but the kids and the pregnant woman. After Josie's texts I started to feel nauseated, but you know how it is with Nausea of Suggestion, but then I woke up at midnight and spent the next six hours alternately throwing up and burrowing into a nest of quilts and pillows and towels I built on the bathroom floor, since I am too pregnant to just spread myself across the tiles like a regular sick person.

Joel had just come down with a cold and hadn't slept all night because our bathroom is hard by our bedroom, but he went out at six to pick up ginger ale and crackers, and then came back and went straight back to bed. I got Eleanor up and made her some toast and let her eat it on the couch because I couldn't stand the thought of sitting at the table while she ate her oatmeal.

Then *I* went back to bed, and Eleanor ran around the house doing Eleanor Things. I've never been so grateful that she's not mischievous. At one point, we were all wedged in the bed, Joel watching tv on his computer and sleeping, Eleanor watching The Jungle Book on my computer and occasionally marching the length of the bed, and me sandwiched between them, not sleeping because of the marching, but not NOT sleeping, either.

Eventually I staggered out and lay on the floor in the living room, and Eleanor (who has had a weirdness about me laying on the floor, or across the entire couch, or basically doing Anything Out Of The Ordinary in the past) let me be sick and rest my body while she sat on the couch and chatted with me, or read, or ate the hunk of cheese and bowl of peanuts I gave her for her lunch.

I kept an eye on her from down here, in case of choking.

I slept during her nap, and in the afternoon Joel emerged from the blankets and then I don't know what happened, but I was asleep on the couch. And I kept waking up and Eleanor would be reading and Joel would be paying bills and I'd feel like I should get up, and then I'd be asleep again.

I slept from when I put Eleanor down at seven until six the next morning, and now I am fine. Joel wasn't AS sick so he's been sick for LONGER, and there's a lot of this going on.

We're coming to BC again soon, so I'm hoping this is the sickness we were meant to have then. I'm hoping neither of us catches Joel's cold, I'm hoping no West-Coast-Specific cooties catch us when we get there. We have paid our sick dues.