The exhausted dad: Blaming the kids for all your virus woes

As much as I try to listen to the medical experts when it comes to navigating the COVID pandemic, some knowledge can only come from personal experience.

As a hypochondriac who wrote a pile of articles about COVID for the Press’ Live Well Magazine over the past three years, I consider myself more knowledgeable than most about how COVID spreads, the best ways to reduce its impact on society, blah, blah, blah.

Then my oldest son got COVID for the first time last week, forcing me to throw out the formerly reliable “How to Deal with COVID in Your Family” playbook.

Let me preface this conversation with a disclaimer: You should continue to follow guidance from credible local and national medical outlets, especially if you don’t have a 9-year-old son. Believe me, I wanted to follow the guidance. I really did. It’s just that my son is… well, gross.

Isolation

My oldest daughter, 11, caught COVID a week before my son. Immediately receptive to our isolation strategies and wanting to keep her siblings from getting sick, she agreed to spending most of her time in her own bedroom (we temporarily moved her roommate, our 7-year-old daughter, over to the boys’ bedroom). Our obedient first child stayed in her room for the most part, then wore an N95 mask whenever she traversed around the rest of the house.

It honestly worked out great for all involved. We stayed away from her illness, and she enjoyed logging hours and hours of Netflix and YouTube Kids time on the iPad.

Seven days into her diagnosis, nobody else showed symptoms. Success, right?! Ha. No.

A week after her positive test (and full recovery), my son woke up sick and tested positive. So we moved him over to his sister’s room and tried to establish the same hygiene protocols that worked (but didn’t really work) for his sister.

Well, he never spent more than an hour in that room by himself. We gave him every device in the house. Kid got unlimited access to computer games, YouTube and Netflix, and instead he chose to wander around the house looking for conversation. The only time he would “rest” would be in front of the living room television so he could play Minecraft. Keeping the “isolation” going would have meant moving the TV and Playstation into his room. Then how am I going to play MY Playstation? So… room quarantine rescinded.

Child-sized masks

I happen to be a big believer in masks, especially when it’s about people with COVID keeping their dang germs to themselves. If my son wasn’t going to isolate, he was at least going to wear an N95 mask around the rest of us. And he wore it! Sorta.

To start, even the small/child-sized N95s don’t fit all that snugly onto tiny faces. Since we let the kid drink from a water bottle at his leisure, his mask spent more time hugging his chin than sealing off those COVID-y airways from the rest of us.

He kept lowering it to talk too. And to rub his nose. And to scratch his cheek. And to eat. And to “take a break” from the mask. And to feel his teeth. And to look at his face in the mirror so he could remind himself of what it looked like without the mask.

Testing

With six people in our house, we can go burn through a bunch of COVID tests very quickly. I see why people don’t bother. With one kid with COVID in the house, you should probably just assume that everyone else has been exposed, right?

Well, even though my own son’s hygiene protocols are disappointing, I still believe in preventing the spread of COVID to other people. Anyway, my other kids are ALWAYS sniffling and coughing. Is it allergies? The common cold? I don’t know! Stick this thing up your nose and see if you can go to school today!

I’m grateful for the free government tests, and the free ones from insurance, and the free ones from the school. But it’s still not enough tests. Because we’re wasting at least one test every day just from kids not following the directions.

Me: “Ok, swab this part around your nostril. Just don’t touch the swab part because it can throw off the test.”

(Insert kid name here) grabs the test by the swab part.

That’s a COVID test for the garbage can.

Me (after putting the test into the little sleeve thing): “Ok, leave this alone for 15 minutes. It can take that long for the second line to show up.”

Three minutes later… (Insert kid name here) grabs the test and looks at it: “Only one line! No COVID!” then throws the test into the garbage can.

Don’t tell the government that we’re wasting so many tests. They might send us a bill or audit our taxes or something.

Then, even after my son was feeling totally fine, we did that responsible thing where we gave him a test just to make sure we weren’t sending him to school with COVID.

Boom. Second line. And there’s even a part of the instructions that pretty much says, “A faint, almost invisible second line still counts as a positive test.”

Some might say, “If he feels fine, just let him go to school.” But what if the school gives him a test and then he tests positive and they call me and are like, “You sent your kid to school with COVID! You’re a bad person!” I don’t like being scolded on the phone! And, yeah, sure, I don’t want to be the parent that sends their kid to school and knocks out an entire third-grade class either. Maybe he’ll be back in school by November. We’re at the mercy of that second line.

You can read a bunch of credible research and listen to the smartest epidemiologists in the world. But you don’t truly understand COVID until your 9-year-old takes his mask off to take a bite of toast and then sneezes in your face.

Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 5-11. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.