flu, cold, tissue

Only because I'm facing this right now. Let me explain.

A week and a half ago, I came down with the flu. Really bad. Because of this, I went through the routine house sanitization. I was walking around with Lysol in a holster. I washed everyone's sheets over and over. We used hand sanitizer around here like it was Vaseline Intensive Care lotion.

A week into my flu, my oldest son started getting sick. First the sniffles, then the full-on runny nose, next the coughing and sore throat until finally, his little body totally gave into the massive cold I'd been trying desperately to keep at bay. So back to the Lysol, the sheet washing, the hand sanitizer . Well, wouldn't you know, the second he finished the last tissue in the tissue box, the other kid gets sick? He's got the all of my big one's symptoms, plus the fever. It's maddening. My house for two weeks and counting has simply been an infirmary.

I know when I was younger I'd heard that when kids get the Chicken Pox, sometimes moms would deliberately expose their other children to it, in order to kill two birds with one stone. Is that crazy? I ask because I worked so hard to keep my kids from getting as sick as I was and nothing worked. Now I'm just exhausted. I'm tired of care-taking, so tired I never completely got well myself. I wonder if it would've made sense not to fight the spread of infection so hard in the first place. Should I have just "let" us all get sick at once? I can't help but feel like if I had, we'd all be over it by now.

Have you ever deliberately exposed one child to the sickness of another?