Hot Mess

Now, I know that the first year is supposed to be the roughest as far as illness goes...but silly me thought that was supposed to be for the child, not the parents.  My husband likes to call our son 'plague baby'...but since this latest illness, I'm thinking that perhaps we should stop blaming the baby and just paint a big red 'X' above our front door. 
 
On Sunday I ran an 18 miler and everything was good.  During my runs, I often use something fairly silly to motivate me...like "I'm going to drink a big glass of lemonade / Coke / whatever I have in my fridge that is NOT milk when I get home."  Now, the irony of this is that I would drink (or eat) whatever I am focusing on anyway, but that's not the point.  So for this particular run, it was "I am going to order Chinese food for dinner tonight."  And trust me, it tasted good.

Until about 2 in the morning.  And then, Patrick and I both got hit with what we thought at the time was food poisoning.  Come sun-up, Patrick somehow got himself to work, and I continued to fever chill and muscle ache all over.  Except this was fevery muscle aching on steroids.  This was I ran 18 mile soreness, cannot keep food or water down to recover from said run, and the typical fevery muscle aching you typically get when sick...all combined to make me unable to even pick my son up.  I literally felt like the worst mother in America as I piled him and all of his toys into his crib, and laid there on the ground shivering under a blanket.

If you are reading this blog, I probably thought about calling you for help.  Heck, I thought about calling my 92 year old grandmother for help (who, I am sure: A. is not reading this blog; and B. would have no problem telling me that I actually am the worst mother in America.  But I was desperate and probably having fever hallucinations.)  Lucky for me, I have a wonderful husband who despite being sick himself, came home and took over child-duty until my mom got off school.  His exact quote: "I knew you must be really sick when I came home and the little Mister was in disposables (diapers)."  If you know my love / obsession with my cloth diapers, you are now beginning to understand just how bad I felt.

I slept fitfully.  I sweated through shirts.  I took various clothing and blankets on and off my body without realizing it.  I dreamt that my body was a storage unit full of weird items that I was selling off (too much Storage Wars??  Yuuup!)  My arms were clocks.  My left leg was a bicycle.  And why didn't anyone want to buy that console table / my right foot?  It's worth at least $2 grand!

I soon found out that it was not just our household that needed that 'X' above the door...it was also a select few that we attended a function with on Saturday night.  And although I am most definitely not glad that my friends got sick too...somewhere, deep inside my twisted soul, I was a *little* relieved to find out that it wasn't the Chinese food making us sick.  Because clearly that would have precluded me from ever ordering from that restaurant again.  And I love Dragon House.  So, so much love for Dragon House.

The next morning, I was feeling much better.  And by today, when I got yet another initiation into motherhood by having to clean up kid-in-the-bed vomit, I almost felt empowered.  And I probably would have gotten all the way there too, if it hadn't been ground bison I was rinsing out of my kid's sheets...