My inlaws are coming to town for the holidays- actually they are already here, but we were preparing for them this weekend when the following mishaps happened:
Sunday - Mark complains of feeling ill and later spends a couple of hours in the bathroom and takes an expected nap that lasts hours. He thought it was an upset stomach from a zinc lozenge he took. Pam thought it might be a virus. Then at about 5 o'clock, Myles coughs, then starts to projectile vomit in the living room. I yell to Mark, who is then in the bathroom still, it's not the zinc lozenge, Pam's right, it's the stomach flu. My plan to go to my former boss' housewarming/holiday party were squashed. I figured with a 6 hour party window, I'd be able to make it at SOME time, but nope. Mark was dressed in a sweatsuit, covered with a robe, wrapped in a fuzzy blanket and turned the heat up to 75 as he snoozed upright on the sofa for most of the night until about 10 when he got up to go to bed and wasn't cold anymore. Mark spent so much time in the loo today, that I had to pee in a disposable baby cup in the laundry room twice. Way to kick off the Christmas season!
Myles seems not upset about the puking, but Mark is getting it every which way. Myles pukes 5 times before bed, and only whimpers and appears upset at the very last occurence. Before that, he was so unconcerned that he didn't even stop watching a commercial on tv as I leaned him over his baby tub which became a portable vomitoire in the living room.
I don't trust Myles to sleep alone, so I sleep upright in the recliner on the leather sofa (easy clean up in case of accidents) with him. He vomits once at 1 am (doesn't awake for the event) and sleeps soundly the rest of the night. Monday morning, Mark is still wiped out. He didn't even get that much time off of work from Christmas, so it' very inconvenient to get sick 2 days before his vacation. He tries to go in midday but my midday it's apparent that ain't happening. So much for help cleaning the house. Myles gets his appetite back for breakfast although he's picky again by lunch. Mark recovers a little more slowly.
By Tuesday, they are all good. It's almost as if it never happened. The illness never hit me and I'm determined to not let anybody else get it, so I'm spraying lysol on every fixture and using hand sanitizer at every turn. Our leaky faucet that was supposed to be fixed on Friday is still not fixed. The plumber is scheduled to come on Tuesday first thing in the morning - after I call and complain about how many times they've dropped the ball to bring it this close to Christmas. I started the process two weeks out and they've screwed off and are now up against the wall, repairing on the same day our family's flight gets in.
8:47 am, plumber gets here. Great. By 11, I'm a little worried. He tells me that a pipe broke, so that while it looks like he's installed the new faucet, there's a gaping hole under the sink. There is black soot everywhere on the fixtures and stuff I've cleaned the day before. Luckily I had the presence of mind to take my rugs out. A bag of toothbrushes and contact lens supplies has been sooted up and appears to have breathing holes where some soot got into it, so I've got to see what can be salvaged later. I remove more stuff and take it to Mark's room. Of course, I see this AFTER he leaves. He leaves it as is and tells me another set of plumbers will come later. LATER? Mark's parent's plane gets in at 12 and his sister's in another 15 after that. Yikes!
The new plumbers arrive at 12, fix the pipe, grease monkey everything up, get black oil on the bottom of our white fabric shower curtain, etc.
I can't actually clean any of it up because by now I've figured out why my child's been behaving like a demon all day. He head butted me VERY hard in my spine earlier, regretted it and said, "mama" and started to pat my back! How does he know how to do that? Who knows. But he'd been running up to Max and letting out an ear-piercing shriek in order to make Max run and otherwise torturing me and the dogs all day. So by now, my neighbor has volunteered to take Myles for a bit so that I can recover from the impending nervous breakdown, but I can't give him to her hungry, I try to feed him some more. No dice.
Now, he's crying nonstop. He already refused vegetable soup and now he's ignoring peanut butter and jelly, and refusing drink. Finally, he puts his hand up to his mouth and tries to undress me to nurse - which he's been not doing for at least a month and a half, so I figure out that he's teething. I find it miraculous, because he just finished cutting more teeth a couple of weeks ago and he's only got room for one more molar per quadrant at this point. He's got 16 out of 20 teeth, and I thought the gods of teething or at least the gods of mayhem would allow us a break. Nope.
He's teething. Oh well, at least it means he has an excuse for his out-of-character, horrible behavior. I give him ibuprofen, pry his mouth open long enough to stick some Ambesol on his back gums where I do feel some activity below the gums and before my hand is out of his mouth, he's asleep in my arms. Good. I'm on the phone with the neighbor still, and I try to put him down and he screams bloody murder and continues to do so for the next 3 hours every time I shift, sneeze, recline or try to escape. Finally at 5:30 I realize that he's never going to let me put him down and I might as well stop trying and just take a nap til Mark gets home. Luckily for me, my inlaws are not only the best people ever, they are also very tired people after getting here and eating, so they haven't called back yet to say, "come pick us up!" So I sleep until 6:30 when Mark gets in. We call them, they say that they are pooped and we say that Myles is cranky - the understatement of the year. Since Mark is home, he's being social, yet still breaking out in a cry every 4 minutes. He's trying to be social, but still suffering. Mark leaves the house to fetch dinner, since obviously, I'm not making any and haven't had a chance to prepare anything beforehand.
Food makes everybody more happy. And all seems well until Myles says, "bug." We think he couldn't know what he's saying, but, nope, he's right. There's an ant on the wall. Mark smashes one and Myles follows suit and more keep streaming out of the light switch. We spend the next hour, not watching our Netflix movie that we didn't get past the credits on. Instead we spend it spraying orange/lemon spray on the ants and killing them. I'm pregnant, so we can't use the good stuff which stinks anyhow.
I just can't believe how busy the little gremlins are right now. But it's just a good thing because we have a really good family. I'm so grateful that they are staying in a hotel this time - it's taken about 90% of the pressure off. We can handle 2 guests, but not 4. And the one bathroom is even more of a problem when I'm pregnant, since I want to pee every 30 minutes! So with 6 adults in our house, we would've been slammed. Next house will be bigger, I promise, but for now, we're in a lil' house built in the 50's and it shows, from breaking pipes, to becoming an ant haven every time in rains.
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