When you become parents, the real meaning of childhood suddenly hits you.

It's not bedtime stories and jungle gyms. You go through childhood so you can get all those childhood diseases before you grow up.

That way you don't have to miss a lot of time at work, which makes employers happy.

The flu bug has hit our household. Actually, it isn't really a bug. You can't spray this stuff away or squash it like you can a nasty bug.

Both our daughters have come down with congestion and bad coughs.

Baby Bailey doesn't have the flu. She has something called croup.

Becca has similar symptoms. But she hasn't been officially tagged with the illness because she hasn't seen the doctor.

Besides, doctors are typically philosophical about all this wheezing and sneezing. They know the kiddie crud will eventually go away.

If you're not a parent, you probably don't have a clue about croup.

It doesn't have a big-name reputation like measles or mumps, or even the spelling challenge of something like pneumonia.

It is just a little five-letter word. Unfortunately, it is also contagious.

Parents hate to hear that word. Contagious means one thing. You have to keep the kid home from school or day care for two days.

It's always two days, no matter what the illness.

Of course, by the time your child has been diagnosed as being contagious, he or she probably has already spread the germs to other children at the babysitter's or at the day-care center.

Our nation spends millions of dollars on sophisticated weapons systems when all we really need to do is let our kids cough heavily on the army of any Third World dictator.

It's tough to fight a war when your troops are suffering from a snotty-nose epidemic.

At any rate, Bailey is struggling with the croup.

The dictionary defines croup as "a spasmodic laryngitis, esp. of infants, marked by episodes of difficult breathing and hoarse metallic cough."

Who writes these definitions? TV shows have episodes. They have definite beginnings and endings, connected by pizza and beer commercials.

Bailey's coughing doesn't include any commercials and you can't turn it off like TV.

I knew she had a bad cough, but I didn't know it was metallic. Dictionary writers are like other writers. They can't resist colorful adjectives.

At any rate, both Bailey and Becca are suffering through the congestion and the coughing.

For new parents, childhood illnesses are a whole new world.

But it doesn't take long to catch on.

No matter the illness, the symptoms are the same: sneezing, wheezing and coughing. Sometimes, kids break out in red spots too.

But it's only serious when they turn into purple dinosaurs and start singing syrupy songs.

When I was growing up constipation was also a childhood disease. It appears a lot in my baby book.

But in recent years, our country has done such a good job of vaccinating everyone that constipation has been dropped from the Surgeon General's list of contagious childhood diseases.

At the Bliss home, we know that Becca and Bailey will recover soon.

But in the meantime, I am still searching for a better adjective for all that coughing.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.