Vomitorium 2013, Take 2, 3, and 4

If you’re not a parent, or maybe you’re a new parent and don’t yet have a four-year-old, one thing that will definitely astonish you when the time comes is the impressive volume of your child’s stomach.  Especially if you are noting said impressive stomach volume at midnight when your child has evacuated the entire contents of same.  All over his bed.  And then manages to do it again an hour or so later.

 

I would recommend, to all you mothers out there, that if your family is going to get sick, to do it in the manner in which we all fell to a stomach virus this weekend: first your husband, then your kid, then you.

 

Tony came home early from work on Friday, something that is so rare that I knew he must be super ill.  When I got home from a run with the dog, I found him curled in bed.  I picked up the kids, we shopped for some 7-Up for Mr. Sick, and returned home.  I kept our little darlings occupied, we had dinner, I did bedtime, and all was well.  Tony actually felt better around 10:30 pm, so he got out of bed and went downstairs to stretch his achy muscles.

 

I thought everything would be fine. 

 

I am such a sucker.

 

Charles started vomiting around midnight.  Tony started our first of many loads of disgusting laundry immediately following that episode while I holed myself up in the bathroom and proceeded to get sick.  By 3 am, I was vomiting, too, and worrying about dehydration because I was, by then, losing water from both ends.

 

It hit me harder than any of our boys.  I could barely crawl out of bed at noon, while Charles was already bouncing off the walls and Jamie, having conquered the sickness a few days previously, was his normal, happy, teething self. 

 

While this clearly sucked balls for me, the extremely sick one, it was probably the best option for the family if all of us had to get sick.  For one thing, I hate it when the others are sicker than I am – I love these boys, and I want them all to be fine.  It’s far easier for me to be scarily ill than to see them be so.  For another, I was so sick that even assuming that the three of them ate marshmallows for breakfast and watched Diego all day didn’t bother me in the least.

 

We chose to quarantine ourselves for most of the weekend, though Tony and Charles ventured out a bit Sunday.  And we have a “finished” home improvement project (a whole saga with bathroom light fixtures that simultaneously look much better than the old ones and make everything look much worse, underscoring the need to patch sheetrock, paint, and tile the floors this summer) to show for it.

 

I have welcomed coffee back into my life, and bread and bananas, but I’m still a bit wary about other foods.  Perhaps tomorrow, cheese.  Perhaps tomorrow.