It’s a week until Christmas. My youngest kid puked at school this morning and had to be picked up from the nurse’s office. I have an awful cold, and vertigo stacked on top of that. It’s great fun.

Have you ever had vertigo? It’s the stupidest thing you can have wrong with you. Tiny little stones inside my inner ear, the ones responsible for balance and feeling movement, migrate out of their proper spot. If I look up the world spins. If I look down the world spins. If I lay on my back the world spins. And when the vertigo is this bad I have a general sense of imbalance. I find myself hanging onto countertops and gripping the banister as I go slowly down the stairs. It feels like preparation for being elderly.

Anyway, as I noted in the first paragraph, it’s a week until Christmas. Three days until we get on an airplane. When you have children in school there really isn’t much you can do to prevent illness from impacting travel. My youngest will be better by Thursday morning, but maybe by then the rest of us will be vomiting. And if we are, I guess we’ll deal with it and reschedule. Traveling early gives us a little buffer.

And I am trying to remind myself about our trip to Disney earlier this year. A freak blizzard on April 1 cancelled our early flight to Florida; we managed to grab seats on the same flight out the next morning, squeezed into the very back of the plane. Instead of rope-dropping Magic Kingdom that next morning, we ended up arriving in the afternoon and heading into Magic Kingdom for dinner and what turned out to be an extremely magical and extremely late evening riding Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean with the kids.

So. Even if we all wake up puking on Thursday morning it will be okay. And in the meantime, I’m digging out the Lysol wipes and hand sanitizer and not looking up.