Vomit Makes Me Want to Puke

Oh, dear, 2 days have gone by already? You know, time just flies when people are throwing up. Don't you think so? Actually, we had a vomit-free day Saturday, on which I ran around like mad and got all my errands done, because I knew that it was merely a brief hiatus and that the stomach-virus fairy was coming back. But she waited....so we went ahead with our plans to pack a fun picnic lunch and drive the 4 youngest to the great science museum in a city about an hour from here. We loaded everyone in the car and headed off and had a fairly uneventful car ride. Because Susie waited until we got all the way there, until we were pulling into the driveway of the museum, to start....erupting, really; there's no other word for it. She sort of burped, and scrambled eggs were pouring out of her mouth, for several minutes, while she sat there looking completely puzzled and the rest of us gawked in horror at what looked like a case of demonic possession. (For the record, scrambled eggs look exactly the same coming back up as they do going down; other foods do not have this property.)

So, Larry and I stripped her down and showered her with a water bottle we found in the car and put a fresh outfit on her (a miracle, really, that we found one in the diaper bag) and marched everyone into the museum. Of course, by this time, my stomach was feeling none too healthy and I had to make a supreme effort not to think about scrambled eggs. The museum was very kid-friendly and one room had a huge waterplay table, with dams and boats and little fountains, that the kids splashed around in, while Larry and I discussed what to do if Susie threw up into the water (we decided to pretend not to speak English); but we didn't have to worry, because all she did was pee all over herself and the floor instead, and no one noticed because it was so wet in there anyway. Yes, we are great parents. Thank you.

We steered the kids back to the car before anyone could get too hungry (no way we were feeding Susie again); so of course Brian cried because he wanted that nice picnic lunch (with lemonade) that we had packed for them and we told him that he had to wait until we got home. I don't really know what happened when we got home because I ran straight from the car up to my bedroom, where I lay for several hours in a fetal position trying not to throw up myself. One would think that after almost 16 years of raising kids I would have already encountered every stomach virus there is, but apparently I missed one.

And now we can just set that theoretical "number of days this blog has gone without mentioning vomit" counter back to zero.