Some days are trials

We’re about 95% sure it was food poisoning. Nothing else really makes sense. No fever, no flu-symptoms, and once it was over, it was over. We’ll see if it returns tonight, but I’m thinking whatever it was has worked through and is now sitting back with a cold beer somewhere snickering at how exhausted we were today.

Oh, I’m sorry, am I starting at the end of the story again? I am, aren’t I. Well. The three older Denizens spent the wee hours last night vomiting, whimpering, and in one rather spectacular case, experiencing her first case of diarrhea that she was actually, you know, aware of.

Miserable does not begin to cover last night, people. I mean. I know these things are part of the human experience and all that. In point of fact, I have extensive experience with such things. On this very day one year ago, I was lying on my bathroom floor wishing someone would kill me dead before I had to approach my toilet again.

But still, trying to comfort your babies through these things, when they’re old enough to be frightened and horrified and embarrassed yet desperately in need of cuddling, trying to reassure them that this will all be over soon, trying to impart to them the wisdom you’ve learned through innumerable bouts of food poisoning, pregnancy, over-indulgence in alcohol and Ye Olde Stomache Flue (“…just let it all come up, honey, your tummy will feel better once it gets rid of whatever is bugging it…”)…well. It’s just no fun whatsoever. Also, it smells bad, and at 3:00 in the morning when you’re getting out of bed for the eighth time to deal with the needs of the next in line for the throne (ahem), well. At 4:15 a.m., three hours into the battle, my husband started to get snippy about the sheets having been in the line of fire yet again (in his defense, he was even more tired than I was, this was the fourth set of sheets we’d changed in less than two hours, and laundry is a foreign and terrifying notion to him), so I sent him back to bed before he could instill Issues in our daughters that would last for decades.

And then proceeded to become snippy myself, catching myself saying, “Oh for carp’s sake, honey, TRY not to puke on the FLOOR!!”

Way to go, Mom. That’s bound to earn some bonus points from the therapists, in years to come. This is like my mother becoming so hysterical every time I hurt myself that I took to hiding in closets trying to stem the bleeding in desperate silence rather than going to a Responsible Adult to have my wounds professionally tended. (Note that this did not get me to quit doing things that got me hurt, oh no. I was not intelligent enough for that.)

Naturally, we kept them all home today.

So naturally, they’re all fine. Running, jumping, eating, drinking, and otherwise making it very, very difficult for us to get anything whatsoever done around here. You would never know from looking at or listening to them that they were ever sick a day in their little lives.

So the fact that I managed to put everything required for soup into the crock pot this morning for Almost Instant Dinner tonight, put in an eight hour day work-wise, crawl upstairs somewhere around lunch time and iron the three (3) shirts that needed it, put away the ironing board, put away the iron, and then tidy up our bedroom and set the Roomba loose therein before bathing, feeding, and doing the dishes while the husband put the kids to bed is, I think, worthy of some kind of blue ribbon.

Preferably one attached to a bottle of Kettle One.