My Shitty Week

Warning- this post contains talk of bodily fluids and may contain some explicit language (depending on my frame of mind by the end of this week).

I want to talk about the dreaded N-word, she says knowing full well that people will be like, “oh my god, I didn’t know that this was that kind of blog.”  You can relax, it’s not.  I was just trying to get your attention.  I’m talking about the other N-word, norovirus.

Yeah, let’s talk about poop.

Let’s also talk about puke and how much of it fits into a 22 pound toddler.  Or let’s not, because I can still very clearly smell it as there are some remnants left on my shirt and her pants.  And she is nestled right up next to me like she has been since Monday night.

When I think back, this apoopcalypse may have actually began last week.   Early one morning my husband woke me up to tell me he had been throwing up since 3AM and that he was calling out of work.  Obviously, I was concerned about him and his wellbeing, but I’d be a big old dirty liar if I didn’t admit that I immediately thought that he was faking so that he could stay home and play video games all day. I assumed that he assumed I would give him a hard time about it, you know, because we’re grownups.  Instead of saying that to his face I wished him well.  He remained home and took it easy (you know, by playing video games, AS I SUSPECTED) and didn’t do much more puking.  We just chalked it up to a bad bit of chicken that he had for lunch and that was that.

Or so we thought.

Sunday morning my husband woke up with another stomachache.  We once again wrote it off.  After all, Saturday was the all-day drunken bacchanalia that we liked to call our annual St. Patrick’s Day party.  When he got progressively sicker as the day went on we started to worry that it was indeed a stomach virus (and I started feeling guilty about secretly calling it the Video Game Flu).

As I am sure you know, job one when you have a stomach virus is cleanliness.  It’s all about keeping the germs inside you, where they belong and off of surfaces that other people touch, where they do not.  It is my long held belief that cleaning everything your sick hands get onto with bleach every twenty minutes is a good way to keep it from spreading.  Also, it goes without saying that there should be handwashing.  Loads and loads of handwashing.  Follow those rules and everything should blow over soon enough with little to no infection of innocent bystanders.  Easy peasy, right?

Riiiiiiight.  Do you know what the one thing you do not want to have happen when someone in your house has a stomach virus?  Plumbing issues of any kind.

So, guess what happened to us Sunday night?

If you guessed that a sentient alien being chose us to be the Earthling ambassadors in their planned attempt at interstellar desegregation, you are super close.

The pipe under the kitchen sink burst.  Which, naturally, rendered all sinks in our house useless.  That in turn meant handwashing was a very complicated undertaking that involved the bath tub and a lot of awkward leaning and grunting.

Okay, no problem.  I wasn’t going to be able to solve this issue Sunday night but I was positive that I could handle it with fresh eyes on Monday.  Being an “I am woman, hear me roar” kind of gal, I borrowed some tools and parts from my step-dad and declared that I would fix the sink so my husband didn’t poop his pants while trying to do it for us.  I am of the opinion that plumbing is 10% having the right tools and 90% upper body strength.  I’m sure you can guess how this turned out.  The tools were not the issue.  After struggling for the better part of an hour (and using all the best swear words I had learned from my step-dad while he fixed my sink the last time), I had to give up.  There one last piece I needed to remove to complete my repair was completely welded in place.  I ordered dinner (pizza for the toddler and I, soup for my sick husband) because I could only justify washing so many dishes in the bath tub.

You can pretty much guess what happened next.  Armapukeddon started while she was in my arms.  Meaning that the first wave of the vomit invasion happened directly down my shirt, onto my pants, and into my shoes.  Now, I had never been barfed on by anyone that wasn’t celebrating their 21^st birthday before, so this was a new and bracing sensation.

I discovered that babies don’t know what throwing up is.  They don’t know what it is, how to do it, or why it’s happening.  They are just as surprised that you are both covered in bile as you are.

Side note, after we were both cleaned up I sat down on the couch with her and tried to comfort her.  She was chewing pretty hard on her hand.  I opened my mouth to ask her how she was feeling and she promptly pulled her hand out of her mouth and shoved it into mine.  Leaving a long string of saliva between us.  I yelped and immediately pulled her hand out of my mouth and said, “Daughter, what are you doing?”  She answered me by sneezing directly into my face.  This is how the zombie apocalypse is going to happen.  It won’t be spread by bites, but by children just, you know, doing what children do.

And so it went.

Today is day four.  Things have improved.  I spent all of the first night on the couch, fighting sleep, afraid that she was going to pull a Mama Cass if I wasn’t awake and hypervigilant at all times.  Last night I was able to spend most of the night in bed and asleep.  Most.

One bright side to all this was that I finally got to watch Season Four of House of Cards (thanks universe for reading my last blog post). 

I am almost caught up on all the laundry we went through (almost five full loads, not including diapers or the mattress pad, both of which require their own special wash routine).  I am tired, I am cranky, but I am thankful.  My husband went to the store to buy BRAT supplies and I asked him to buy me a treat.  He sarcastically asked me why, “Because you’ve been such a good girl?”

Um, yeah.  I’ve rocked this entire week.  I parented, wifed, and homeownered the shit out of it (big shout out to my father in law for coming over and helping with the sink, turns out I was 100% out gunned this time). 

He got me three treats. Delicious chocolatey treats.