MARK MY WORD: FAMILY SICKNESS IS EVERYTHING TO SNEEZE AT

The Bliss family has been anything but blissful this past week.

We all came down with a sniffles-clogged-up-throat-sinus-infection.

Personally, I think we could do without sinuses. They don't seem to serve any useful purpose except to make people miserable.

It's bad enough when you're feeling sick. But when your kids are sick too, you feel worse.

Things were so bad that we all stood in line in the upstairs bathroom to take our nightly dose of cough medicine.

Our whole house was one big germ-fest.

Germ-warfare guys would have loved our home.

Joni made two separate visits to a hospital emergency room with the kids.

We all ended up on antibiotics. Our daughters, Becca and Bailey, took two different kinds of antibiotics over the course of the week.

Naturally, their antibiotics were pink liquids. No matter what kind of antibiotic is prescribed for a child, the pharmacist will give you something pink.

There must be some federal law that requires children's medicines to be pink.

It doesn't, however, require them to taste good. In fact, one requirement for any good medicine is that it tastes bad.

Becca and Bailey find that hard to swallow. They would readily take any other color of medicine if it tasted good.

You know your pre-school kids are sick when they don't want to do anything but sit on mom's or dad's lap.

Five-year-old Becca was so sick she didn't even want to look at her bike.

All she wanted to do was watch the Don Knotts' movie, "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken."

It's a good movie for kids. But after you've watched Knotts crack the case of the murder-in-the-spooky-mansion 10,000 times, it gets a little old.

One-year-old Bailey cried a lot and left a trail of Kleenex tissues throughout the house.

It wasn't at all like home life in television sitcoms. There, when kids get sick, they rest quietly in bed. There isn't any loud, hysterical coughing.

In the TV shows, the kids get well after the commercial break.

But in real life, the commercial breaks don't come soon enough.

Joni and I juggled work schedules all week so we could take turns taking care of the kids.

We spent a lot of time watching TV because we felt too bad to move off the couch.

One night we watched a murder show in which the victims died of smallpox.

That cheered us up. "Things could be worse," Joni admitted.

I agreed. After all, being miserable isn't so bad. After so long, you get used to all that sneezing and wheezing.

It's watching the same video over and over again that drives you crazy.

It's been said that writers can get all choked up over their work.

Fortunately, the condition is short lived. Besides, a little cough medicine works wonders.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.