Some Days Are Like That

I remember when Tristan was born, the day after I came home from the hospital my Dad came and took my sister home who’d been with us to help, especially with watching our girls while I was gone.  The day after that Rick headed out the door himself to continue with a class for his graduate studies.  School was to start the next week in August as well so I knew that I’d have to figure my new life out pretty quickly anyway.  Of course the baby was waking up numerous times during the night, being only four days old and that left me, a very exhausted Mommy, alone with three children to juggle for the first time.  I remember waking up in a haze at around 10 in the morning realizing that I could hear my three and five year olds out in the kitchen together but nobody had been around to get them any breakfast and here it was so late in the day already.  So I stumbled out of my bed, leaving a sleeping baby to go and take care of them.  And there I found them taking care of themselves instead.  Lemonade and Pop-Tarts were the order of the day.  My first thought was to start telling them that lemonade and pop-tarts were not appropriate breakfast fare, but I allowed my guilty conscience to be immediately replaced with the thought that I could allow my standards to change a little bit for one day.  Not everyday would be filled with lemonade and pop tarts for breakfast; for one day it would be OK.  They were happy, I had slept and they were learning to take care of themselves.   All was as it should be.  No need for a guilty conscience.  It was OK. 

Today was a little like that.  The stomach bug that hit two of my kids late last week hit the rest of my kids as well as Rick and myself starting yesterday evening.  I’m pretty much “bullet-proof” to most of what my kids bring home… but not this one.  It knocked us flat on our backs and the words “vile”, “sick as a dog” and “death-warmed-over” come to mind.  I haven’t been that sick in over 20 years.  In a haze of fitful sleep suffering from chills and body aches I recalled the time I had to sweat out a fever in my un-insulated attic bedroom under a pile of quilts in February and my Mom sending someone up to see if I was still alive.  And there was another time of collapsing in bed, sick as a dog, still in uniform after working a double shift at the hospital.

Haley and Tristan were fully recovered from their bug but were the only two healthy ones in the house.  We, the parents, were not healthy enough to leave the house to even drive them to school.  So they were in charge of everything at home and overall it ended up being OK.  They ate, they argued, they played, they complained, they cleaned up and took temperatures and changed diapers and loaded and unloaded the dishwasher and got the overflowing recycling out the door and the garbage can retrieved from the curbside.  Rick and I never made it out of bed except to stumble out for gingerale once or twice.  We could hear the ruckus a few times and once I had half a mind to just get up and take over… but I couldn’t.  I remembered the lemonade and pop tarts.  Not every day is like this.  They will live and the house will recover.  We survived.  Some days are like that.