I’m sure you all missed me yesterday, and believe me, I would have much rather been working for your entertainment than collapsed in my bed totally destroyed by a massive dose of the mega plague — courtesy of my nephew.  I thought that providing care for adorable little children would be kind of a rad job, aside from poopy diapers and whining.  Most of the time (when they’re not actively shitting themselves, or hatching a master plan to shit or piss on something else) my nephews are charming, funny, and cute as hell.  At least that’s what I thought until yesterday.  Today, I’m revising my opinion.

My nephew Avery has lately been infected with a cold.  He’s been a little cranky, but he’s weathered the storm fairly well.  He’s had a nasty cough and been a little feverish, but most of the time he’s just toddling happily around, chasing the dogs and laughing hysterically at dirt clods.  Same old same old.  I felt sorry for the poor raspy little thing, so I gave him lots of love .  BIG MISTAKE!  HUGE!  The disease that failed to knock a one and a half year old down for five minutes felled me with such finality that I couldn’t lift my head for 24 hours except to expel massive phleghm globbers.  I thought I was gonna die.

Because of this, I have decided that infant virology is a study unto itself.  I’m pretty sure that unlike viruses that infect your regular, full-sized human, disease that inhabits fun-sized people operates more like a reverse ponzi scheme.  Basically, the only way kids get rid of illness is to pass it on to adults, who in turn get about 1 billion times sicker than the kid ever got, thus resulting in a much more diseased world overall.   Meanwhile, the kid gets the benefit of pretty much doing whatever he wants while the adult is too sick to stop him. Everybody wins — well, at least everybody on Team Cookie and Bubo.

Here is a comic I made to help illustrate my point: