“Do you mind checking the dosage on this one? I think I put too many in the boy’s cup this morning, so I told him to take only one. I think we need to put the extra one back in the bottle”

So said my wife when I came down for breakfast, as she handed me a medicine cup.

This is how we dole out the kids’ medication. Each kid gets his or her own cup with the proper medicines at the proper dosages. Normally, this is my job every morning and evening—a job that involves taking every pill bottle out of our “apothecary box,” reading each bottle to verify who gets what and how many of each, and placing the appropriate medicines in each kid’s cup. It also involves getting out the Gatorade for the one kid who can’t handle the taste of his medicine with water, and getting out the milk for the other kid who can’t handle Gatorade or water. In the morning it also involves bringing two of the boys their medicine in bed so that it can begin working in them before they join the rest of us. Depending on how awake I am, this can take between five and ten minutes.

Well, this morning I was late coming downstairs, so Katie took over the job. Only our doctor had just changed the dosage on one of the prescriptions, and she couldn’t remember what it had changed to. Hence the extra pill.

So I sat down at the table and began my usual ritual of sorting through the apothecary box to find the right bottle so I could put the extra pill away. A few minutes later, this is what the kitchen table looked like. (For those of you not patient enough—or not anal enough—to count, that’s eighteen bottles there.)

Why eighteen? Because, in keeping with the laws of the universe, it was the last bottle in the box. It’s always the last bottle in the box. Just once, I’d like it to be the first bottle. Or the fifth. Or the eleventh. Hell, I’d be happy if it was the seventeenth. But no, it’s always the eighteenth. <sigh>