for want of a barf bag

sunday night, DM and i were discussing the fact that our littles were active snot-faucets again and how i wasn't ready for another cold and flu season because last year it lasted for five months. seriously. from november 2012 through march 2013, a minimum of two of us and an average of four of us were sick with some sort of nasty crud, including the week where i was possibly dying from the flu even though i got a flu shot (i'm not one of those crazy anti-vaccine people. just stating the facts. i actually got a flu shot again this year. an hour later i could barely move my left arm and i said as much to DM with a follow up message, "but don't worry, it's not my drinkin' hand." :))

anyway. during said conversation about sickness and snot (was that part of our wedding vows?) DM reminded me of this one time during that extended snot saga when Jack randomly projectile vomited twice. but we think that was just rapid over-consumption of mango juice because he was perfectly fine afterwards. then DM says, "we've actually been really lucky in the barf arena.... knock on wood."

now. let me take this opportunity to inform you that DM is the KING of jinx. like, if there is a Jedi-mind-trick-master, he is the opposite. he is the master of making sh*t that you do not want to happen, happen, by saying "oh that'll never happen" out loud. so, after he said the thing about our generally barf-free lives, i knew with complete certainty that at least one of my children would be puking within 24 hours.

i sealed our fate by making a joke to a girlfriend (who is due any moment with her first child, and who had likened pre-labor ministrations to primping for senior prom) about how birthing a child is sort of like senior prom in that you become completely disoriented and wake up in bed with a stranger, covered in bodily fluids (yours and others'). (so i've heard. i assure you nothing so exciting happened at my prom, being the staunch anti-drug-and-alcohol a$$hole ambassador that i was.)

cue monday morning. got "the call" from daycare. do you know what i'm talking about? i am talking about the "your child got sick at daycare and is now too sick to be at daycare oh and ps she can't come back tomorrow either so good luck with that" call. do you know there is a special ring tone for this call? it rings to the dulcet tones of my career taking a flying leap out of an 18th story window to it's death on the concrete sidewalk below. but oh well. what're you gonna do?! so i went to go pick up my snotty little snuggle muffin. she had a slight fever and a lot of yellow goo but was generally in good spirits. i planned to take her home and leave J at preschool until later in the afternoon, but apparently she was scarred by their short separation this weekend because when i told her we weren't going to go get brother until later, she looked at me like i had just personally massacred her favorite pet. she was utterly heartbroken, and started wailing "brudderrrrrrrrrr, brudderrrrrrrrrr, brudderrrrrrrrrrrr, brudderrrrrrrrrrr, go geen 'um [go get him]" all the way home. so i called an audible, swung by the preschool, and snatched up big bro. they were mostly fine and DM came home a tad early and we got them to bed by 7:30 which never happens, ever.

all was well until the little miss woke up in the middle of the night. DM went in to get her, but then he called to me over the monitor that she had a fever and chills. i went in and her whole body was violently shuddering. aside from the body quakes, though, she was a pretty happy camper. she was chattin' away but we couldn't understand her because she was shaking so hard. i'm not really a wimp about sick kids... we've had scrapes and cuts and bloody noses and enormous eggs on the dome etc. without too much fuss, but when she was about 3.5 months old, my one-kidneyed daughter had a kidney infection and it got gnarly and all the doctors kept referring to it as a "life threatening event" and it scared the bejesus outta me so now anytime she has a fever or other unexplained symptoms i freak the frack out.

so. DM called the always helpful nurse triage hotline while i tried to keep the girl warm. (they always ask a litany of completely irrelevant questions. they even start their spiel by basically warning you that they are about to ask you a bunch of random a$$ sh*t. "can she walk in a straight line while reciting the ABCs backwards? does she prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream? who is her favorite sesame street character?") i will mention, in a stroke of seemingly unrelated foreshadowing, that lately Colby Jean has been obsessed with putting things down shirts. mostly my shirt. also her shirt. she loves to collect dead leaves and flowers from the patio, or hot wheels, or legos, or crayons, or used tissues, and stuff them down my shirt so that they're nested in my cleavage. she gets really upset if/when i try to "take out the garbage," so to speak. she also becomes perplexed/distressed when she puts things down her own shirt and they just fall right through, rather than getting lodged in the boobular region. anyway. maybe, if you were an english major or something, you can guess where this is headed...

Colby had been quietly snuggling and shuddering when suddenly she reared back with this confused look on her face. then i hear the pre-barf-warning-sounds. every parent and pet-owner knows what i'm talking about. still. neither she nor i had time to react. she had never thrown up (like, legitimately vomited) before, and it caught us both by surprise. the first one went all down her front, but then, before the second round began, her eyes locked onto her favorite receptacle as of late - a.k.a., my boobs. she grabbed the collar of my shirt (luckily, or, unluckily, a v-neck) and bent over like a verdrunken sorority girl prayin' to the porcelain gods. so deft were her movements then that i have to assume she was tapping some sort of innate knowledge. at that point i was paralyzed... i didn't want to move for fear of leaking or jostling the contents of my cleavage... so i called, as loudly as i could without waking the other child, for a bowl, and backup, both of which were delivered in short order. of course, by then, it was too late. my C-cups runneth over. with barf.

with some assistance, i was able to get myself, and the girl, cleaned up, and Super Dad took the next shift, which, unfortunately for him, ended up lasting until 3:30am. unfortunately for me, as soon as i was de-barfed and climbing back in between my clean warm sheets, J woke up for who knows what reason (an evil ax-weilding ghost? a gnat?) and i was too tired to battle so i just climbed in bed next to him and spent the next 3 hours attempting to sleep with heels and toes jammed up in my ribs and nose.

so yeah. that was my monday. how's your week going?!

i don't know why, but the "pre-barf-warning sounds" remind me of this:
Buttercup: We'll never succeed. We may as well die here.
Westley: No, no. We have already succeeded. I mean, what are the three terrors of the Fire Swamp? One, the flame spurt - no problem. There's a popping sound preceding each; we can avoid that. Two, the lightning sand, which you were clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future we can avoid that too.
Buttercup: Westley, what about the R.O.U.S.'s?
Westley: Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.