It’s May. You’re almost there. You’ve plugged all 23 kid activities into the shared family calendar. You’ve signed up for end-of-year party snacks, you’ve put your name down to volunteer at field day, you’ve ordered recital costumes. The swimsuits are hanging in the laundry room, there’s a surplus of sunscreen in the hall closet, and there’s an OOO email crafted for each day you’ll be busy attending one of your kids’ concerts or award ceremonies or soccer games. Everyone’s excited. The kids are counting down until the end of the school year. They’re daydreaming about all the things they’re going to do this summer, practicing their piano pieces and dance moves, picking their spiritwear outfits.
And then you hear them sniffle.
The End-Of-The-School-Year Illness might be the worst of all of them. You suffered through all of fall with your kid pouring snot like a faucet. In the bleak months of January, when the holiday cheer has been replaced by bloating and seasonal affective disorder, everybody was sick. There were stomach bugs, coughs, and maybe-COVID-but-you’re-scared-to-test, so everybody missed like six more days of school.
When spring came, suddenly everyone was OK again. You realize that we humans are as simple as daisies — all we needed was some sunshine — and you start looking forward to life again. Things get a little busier and there’s a lot more to look forward to, but it’s OK! Because everybody’s healthy! You can finally put that Children’s Motrin away instead of leaving it on the kitchen windowsill like a piece of decor.
But April showers bring May flowers, and May just brings… germs, apparently. You can theorize that everyone starts getting busy and spending more time with each other, which causes our immune systems to act like they’ve never seen a virus before. Maybe it’s a mixture of allergies and weather changes and sharing sno-cones with kids at spring festivals that ratchets up the coughing and snot. Maybe the spring break travels lingered in our systems until they saw that we were getting a wee bit stressed about the activities in May and decided to attack.
Either way, consider the End-Of-The-School-Year Illness one more thing to check off in May. Hopefully, it comes with enough buffer time for the soccer trophy ceremony. Hopefully, it doesn’t spread through the house slowly, infecting a new member every four days or so until it’s been a full two weeks of someone in your house sneezing all over the place. Hopefully, your kids don’t have to miss tie-dye day or luau day. And, hopefully, you still have the energy to bring four dozen cupcakes and 100 filled water balloons to the last day of school.
It’s like our immune systems need one more good workout before they get a summer of mucus-free noses, clear lungs, and normal bowel movements. They just want to do one more overload session before they hibernate as we use vitamin D and drippy ice cream cones and the sun still being out until 8 p.m. to heal us.
Because before you know it, it’ll be Labor Day again. And you’ll hear that sniffle once more.