"sick"

So Kai woke up this morning not excited to open his advent calendar. The chocolate advent calendar has been my best friend this December, since grumpy little boys who don't otherwise want to go to school are more inclined to get out of bed if it means opening a little tab and finding a poorly defined, not especially delicious dab of chocolate. 

He tells me, "mom, I don't feel so well." And I tell him, as I do each time he tries this, "well, just get up and dressed, get a little breakfast and see how you feel then." Then I usually tell him, "just go to school and if you still feel sick, tell your teacher and I'll come get you." That generally works: it gets him to school, he starts having fun and forgets that he didn't want to go in the first place.

But today after he got dressed he tells me, "I still don't feel well."

Then he starts crying.  

My boys never cry.

And quite honestly, I'm a big pushover when they do, because I feel like it's real since it takes a lot to make them cry. So when he cried, I caved. I left him with strict warnings to not touch, look at, or even *think* about video games, that all he can do is lay in bed, read, sleep or maybe watch a dvd if it's not too fun. "This is not a vacation," I unsympathetically told him.

He calls me around noon with the information that his cousin is also sick and "recovering" at the house. I tried to figure out if they could have conspired together to skip school today but couldn't work out how they'd managed to coordinate, when I know they haven't seen each other in ages. Still, I was convinced something was up when Kai tells me that "actually, [cousin] is not really that sick." Now, said cousin is not conspiring or sneaky or anything, nor is Kai, but I just had to wonder.

So at lunch I run home to bring some lunch to the invalids, to find them up and running around, and most certainly not sick. So I passive-aggressively mention to them, "wow, it's so weird that you both were sick on the same day! What are the chances?" Then the cousin tells me she's not really sick but was sick earlier this week and may still be a touch contagious so she didn't get to go to school today. 

Made sense. Made me feel better.

Nine is not old enough to plot like that, right?

wait, he still totally got out of school...