Empathy and Lysol: A Puking Tale

Excuses, Excuses...

After a year long hiatus, I've finally decided to dust off my long neglected blog and update.
Today for some reason, I finally have a few minutes to write. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to update, but hopefully it will be more than an annual visit (no promises though!).

My children have obviously changed quite a bit in the past year, but I'm pretty sure some things about them will never change. Ellie will always err towards the dramatic side 

I have a feeling that Maya will always have a strong opinion about absolutely everything (the teen years promise to be interesting).

Kiki is still revealing her personality little by little, but as of right now, her sole mission in life is to destroy my house as quickly as possible. She's succeeding. 

The Great Cheese Blizzard of '11

Curiosity Killed the Cat 
If motherhood has taught me one thing, it is how to deal with is disgusting bodily fluids. If I wasn't so petrified of needles, I'm pretty sure I'd make a great nurse. Once Maya was born, I quickly learned that Ellie was a sympathy puker (I'm pretty sure everyone knows somebody like that).  No matter how healthy Ellie is, the moment one of her sibling's begins heaving, Ellie will be right there sharing the bucket/ toilet/my just mopped kitchen floor. Two memorable incidents come to mind. Those with sensitive stomachs should stop reading right now.

This was pretty much the face I got.

It was a rare peaceful afternoon, I think I was actually catching up on my facebook stalking *ahem* reading. Suddenly I heard a sound that would automatically strike fear in any mother's heart: vomiting. I mentally took stock of my children's health and as far as I could remember, no one was ailing. No fevers, no glassy eyes, no one had even complained of a stomach ache.

I rushed into the dining room and found Ellie standing there with an utterly shocked expression on her face. And unfortunately her breakfast was running down her shirt and sitting sadly in a regurgitated puddle on the floor.

She looked up at me and forlornly said, "Mom. I puked."
I calmly replied, "I see that. What happened?"
In a small, distressed voice she said, "Well, I put my finger down my throat"

And this was my face. 

I was expecting a litany of complaints that would herald in the dreaded stomach flu, and those were the last words I expected. Of course I asked her what possessed her to do that.
She matter of factly replied, "Well, I just wanted to see what was down there."

Well, now she knows what's down there and thankfully she hasn't repeated the experiment.

The Dark Side of Empathy
Yet another stomach malfunction occurred just a few months ago. My husband was gone for 3 weeks on a training exercise and while I was sad to see him go for any amount of time, I was confident that it would go smoothly. After all we've handled 2 deployments (grand total of 25 months) so 3 weeks was a piece of cake. The first week that he was gone went pretty well, the girls missed him terribly but it wasn't anything that we couldn't handle. Then disaster struck.

On day 8, Ellie began running a fever which wouldn't break. And if you remember, Ellie is my drama queen. A scraped knee is the end of the world, so in her mind a fever is tantamount to Armageddon. After 5 days of the stomach flu (I'll happily never touch another bottle of Tylenol or Motrin again) she was finally on the road to health and I was finally going to get a full night's sleep.  Maybe I'd even do the dishes.

Seriously Mom, you should do something. 

The next day, while I was trying to catch up on 5 days of dishes, I heard a familiar sound. I walked into the living room and discovered that the stomach flu had struck Maya. And a newly healthy Ellie had (predictably) empathized with her sister in the most basic way possible, she puked too. Then my distressed children began walking around the house, wailing and puking, leaving a disgusting trail behind them. Words cannot describe the absolute lunacy of the situation. Maya continued to throw up because she was sick, Ellie kept throwing up simply because Maya was and Kiki decided that she was missing out on the action so she slipped in the many piles of puke and hit her head. I was torn between hysterical weeping (I hadn't slept in a week) and running out the door screaming.

So I called my mother.

By the time I actually found my phone, practicality won out. Someone had to deal with the puke and it sure wasn't going to be Ellie. I quickly used a community hospital's supply of Lysol, performed a communal hose down in the shower and installed all of the children on their respective sick beds. Then after some therapeutic whining to my mother about all the upchuck, I realized that after a little bit of sleep, this might seem funny.

So the moral of the story? If you have children, develop an iron stomach and buy stock in Lysol (no they didn't pay me to say that. I seem to be such a huge fan of it though, I'd be more than happy to accept a free case or two).