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Evolution of the Sick Day

This is another post in my Vick's VapoRob VapoDad series. I should do a little update for you. On the first post I announced that I was in a fantasy football league and although I know nothing about football I was kicking but... Then I announced that Drew Brees was the Vick's VapoDad.

Ironically that week my team played a team with Drew on it... I lost miserably and then my team spiraled down to a total fail...



Sick days... I've found that the idea of them has changed drastically since I was a kid.

Back in the day, unless you were deathly ill, they were great... Especially if they were only a day or two long. If you were out for more your parents might make you do school work to catch up and that's just ridiculous.

But one day out for me meant The Price is Right and hoping that I'd get to see that guy drop in the Cliffhangers game



It also meant my mom would make orange Jello with sprite and pineapple inside... It was awesome then but now I think of what's in Jello and it's just disgusting to me but still it was all good.

And I'd usually get an Archie digest... If I was going to the doctor I might get a double digest but the single was ok for one day.

Then came my teenage days... Not as awesome on the homefront because there comes that time in which you're old enough to be home alone and take care of yourself... I'd make my own soup or whatnot, no Archie comics but I still had TPIR. But I had a job so sick days meant I didn't have to work... It also meant I didn't get paid.

And sometimes they meant if I had something going on I could call in sick to work and have a free day... I didn't so that often but it happened a couple times.

College is when sick days stared sucking... It's not easy to miss classes, at least it wasn't for me, so sick days involved me dragging my but to class and getting everyone else sick... Basically getting experience for later on in life. No professor cares that you missed a test when you're sick... I actually missed one because I got my wisdom teeth pulled and the whole city was out of codeine (not even kidding) and I got dinged huge for taking a test late.

Then you get a real job... There are three kinds of adult sick days...

The one where you're sick as a dog and you go to work anyway because you have so much stuff going on that you can't miss... And everyone else did the same so you're just passing germs back to some other poor sucker.

There are the ones where you're super crazy sick and really can't go to work... And life is miserable because no one is making you soup. You're too sick to go to the drug store to get the meds you're out of  them. Side note, and I'm not saying this they're sponsoring this post, Vicks sent me an awesome care package of their products and it was awesome because I was out of everything and a day from leaving on my Mexico trip... Nyquil and Dayquil were to the rescue... As much as I'm a dude who rarely takes meds I seriously love that stuff.

And since you're going no where you can't get an Archie double digest and if you did it might look like you're creepy or a loser since you're too old, and they probably lose something when you're almost 40...

But you still might see the Cliffhanger game on TPIR, even though it's old, however you'd have to sit through Drew Carey's semi-awkward hosting duties...

Those are the first two... I guess I could add the fake ones... In full disclosure I've pulled one of those as an adult but it was to go snowboarding and it was a day that nothing was really going on so it's all good.

The last kind of sick day is when people with kids are taking sick days to be home with their sick kid...

If you're like me you think this is the greatest scam ever at least I thought to pre-kid.

First off who knows that the kid is sick anyway... Second, remembering from my days of youth, I was a perfect angel when I was sick and so when my mom stayed home it was like a vacation for her.

And so I kind of envied these people who took days off to look after their "sick" kid.

Then MF started getting sick. All. The. Time.

It happened in correlation to him going to school... The problem was I was relatively new to my job so taking time off might not look great. And Staci was at the end of her school year which is really important and hard to miss (then at the beginning of the year after the summer break when he had a relapse of being sick All. The.Time.)

She got him on the summer days, I took a lot of the other days. And let me tell you, as you know if you have toddlers... Sick days suck.

The first sick day I took off with MF I can remember him not even trying to sleep. He didn't want to watch Kipper, his favorite show at the time and a fave of mine. He just wanted to run around like a maniac even though he was crazy sick. He wanted to eat everything but had nothing. He would have moments of awesome cuddling but that would last maybe two minutes at a time then we'd start all over again...

It was nuts... It was not relaxing... It got me sick... And so the second day I had to do the same running around while my head felt like it was in a vice while I was underwater.

I can't wait until we get to the good days I remember... When we can watch TPIR, probably hosted by Russel Brand by then, and eat some fake vegetarian Jello, or real vegetarian fake Jello and read some Archie comics...

But for now we're in the stage where something that was so great became something so not good.

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