Baby Mac is sick. Again. Seems like my youngest grandson has continuously battled bugs of this sort and that ever since he was just a few months old.

This time Baby Mac has an especially nasty bug, of the croup and bronchiolitis sort. Megan called me Tuesday on the drive home from the pediatrician, where Baby Mac and his Mommy had to endure the trauma of Mac's first-ever nebulizer treatment. It was horrific—for both—with Mac screaming from beginning to end.

My poor babies. I imagine it was no fun at all for either. I can only imagine such treachery because as a mother, I never had to do such a thing, never had to administer a breathing treatment for a sick child. In all honesty, my kids were—thankfully!—relatively healthy. Now that Megan's a mom, she realizes that. It's something we've discussed often, as both my grandsons seem to be sick a lot, and Megan thinks there's some magical answer to keeping kids healthy, one she's not yet been privy to.

"Am I just a bad mom?" she pleaded for an answer Tuesday. "What am I supposed to be doing that I'm not?"

Usually when Megan asks that question, my first response—selfish as it may be—is, "You need to move out of that <cuss> desert and back home to the mountains."

Not this time, though. Because Megan was on the verge of tears. Because she was scared. And because she was sitting in the car in the garage having just reached home from the doctor's office and had a sick nine-month-old zonked out in his carseat, exhausted from the traumatic treatment, as well as Bubby sitting quietly beside him, and they all needed to get into the house.

"You're doing everything you're supposed to, Megan," I told her. "You got the baby to the doctor and he's being taken care of. That's what you were supposed to do. There's just a lot of crud going around right now and Mac just keeps getting it, for whatever reason. It's nothing you are doing or not doing."

Jim, who was home for lunch and part of our call, confirmed to Megan that a mom he works with has young kids who are sick far more often than was the norm when our kids were little. It's just the way it is nowadays, he said, for reasons we don't know.

"It'll be okay," I told her. "Just get the kids inside and call me later."

It's exactly such times that the distance from my grandbabies, from my daughter, are the hardest. I couldn't just hop in the car and head over to her place to help her out, to hug my sick grandson or, more importantly, to hug my stressed-out daughter.

The most I could do was text her a few hours later, when I figured things had calmed down a bit: 

Despite the crappy day and a croupy kid, at least my daughter still had her sense of humor. Jamaican or not, Megan is indeed a good mon—just because it sounds so cool.

And perpetually sick kids or not, she is indeed a good mom, too. Just one who needs a hug from her own mom—yet lives too far away to get exactly that.

Today's question:

What are your thoughts on kids being sick more often than they were back in the day—that day being when you were a kid or when your kids were kids?