Once again I’m trying hard to work from home, but now with the added stress of having a sick kid at home with me. She’s really not a great deal of trouble, but I’ve become used to having the house to myself during the day and I find it distracting to have someone else here.

Selfish? Yes, I guess so, but I must admit I don’t have a great deal of sympathy with this particular sick kid. She definitely had something very nasty going on last week, when she was felled with some sort of virus. She was running a fever, and generally felt very run down. But all the more alarming symptoms have subsided now and she’s left with simply a nasty cough.

It’s no fun to have a bad cough, I appreciate that, and she can’t really sit in her classroom with a cough like this … all the other students will be wondering whether they’re being exposed to pleurisy or tuberculosis or something. But she could always just take some darn cough medicine! But no, she categorically refuses to take cough medicine because it tastes bad.

Well, at that point I run out of sympathy. It’s like having a terrible headache and choosing not to take any Tylenol. I can still feel bad that you’ve got a headache, and I appreciate that your head hurts … but at that point you’re choosing to have a headache, ya know? Same thing with this cough … it’s been slightly more than a week now, and she’s missing a pretty serious slice of school. If her cough doesn’t improve in another day or so, I think we’ll have to insist on the medicine … but with a fourteen year-old, there’s only so much insisting one can do.

OK, rant over … back to work.