The Part Where Parenthood Kicks Your Butt

Usually I’m the mom on the right. These days, well, let’s just say the mom on the left would be a step up.

Last Monday night, Emmett threw up. A lot. It was disgusting. Little did we know, it was only a shadow of what was to come.

Here’s the short version:

• 10 person-days of vomiting
• 23 person-days of diarrhea
• 10 person-days of fever
• 1 febrile seizure
• 1 ambulance ride
• 2 ER treatments
• 2 urgent care evaluations
• 2 pediatrician evaluations

The first time your kid pukes on you — like legit pukes, not that piddly spit-up crap — you get a little on your hand or your sleeve and you’re like, “Oh my God, this is SO GROSS,” and maybe freak out a minute, scrub your hands, change your clothes. Around the fifteenth or twentieth, you’re just glad none got in your mouth that time. You wipe your face of with a baby wipe, swipe it over your hair to get the chunks out, and go back to soothing your distressed child. You are grossed out, but it’s like it’s happening to someone else. It has to be that way. Otherwise, how would you get through it?

Because babies are so stupid. They don’t even know how to throw up right. Any intelligent creature knows not to puke on itself, no? But babies are dumb. You have to show them how to lean forward, aim them toward something so it doesn’t go everywhere, and then stop them from lying down in it. And you have to do it over. And over. And over. All day, all night, every day, every night, for more than a week.

And if you’re really lucky, you have to do it in between changing the most disgusting diapers in the history of diarrhea, diapers that make you want to put the entire Diaper Genie out at the curb rather than open it and change the bag, diapers that make you sorry for all of the times your parents had to change your poopy butt when you were a baby. If you’re really, really lucky, you have two babies the same age with diarrhea at the same time.

If this is the last time I ever ride with my baby in an ambulance, that’s totally okay with me.

Initially I thought I had poisoned Emmett with some chicken that was too old for baby consumption. He ate a lot more than Miles did. Miles was just a little sick and had no vomiting. I felt terrible. Then, all hell broke loose and I realized it wasn’t the chicken. Oh my God, I wish it had been the chicken. Because this all started Monday night, and Wednesday night I woke up to Jesse moaning about his stomach and while I was researching after-hours urgent cares, I started having diarrhea and vomiting violently. I staggered back into the bedroom with a kitchen pot full of puke in my arms and found Jesse wretching into a bucket. He threw up exactly one time. I, however, continued vomiting approximately every 20 minutes for the next day. Until about dinner time.

Because if you’re really, really, really lucky, the baby who has just diarrhea and no vomiting will spike a fever out of nowhere in the middle of dinner (which he’s basically refused to eat, THANK GOD) and have a SEIZURE and become completely unresponsive and you will have no idea what’s going on until you touch him and he’s burning up and you figure it out it’s a febrile seizure and call 911.

And you strip him down and lay him on the floor on his side one the seizure stops, an agonizing 2-minute wait during which he turns blue, and try to get him to look at you and stay awake while you wait for the paramedics, all the while trying not to puke on him while your husband holds the other baby, who is screaming because he wants you and doesn’t know what happened to his brother. And you ride in the ambulance with your naked baby in his car seat strapped to a stretcher, all the while clutching an emesis bag so you don’t vomit all over the inside of the ambulance. And when you get to the hospital, you have to sit down on the floor while they check him in because you think you’re about to pass out. And when you get to the triage room with your poor, naked, burning-up baby, you have to lie down on the bed to hold him because you’re afraid you’ll drop him and oh-my-god-why-is-he-so-hot.

Miles had a fever of more than 103 when they got his temperature at the ER, after he’d been stripped to his diaper for more than an hour. They gave him Motrin and he drank cups and cups full of ice water and cold Pedialyte through a bendy straw while he clung to my chest and whimpered. Jesse arrived after about half an hour (his sister raced to the house to watch Emmett) and I left Miles with him while I went to the adult ER to be checked out. My BP was alarmingly low, and they fast-tracked me past all of the people in the waiting room into a triage room where they hooked me up to a heart monitor and immediately administered fluids, Zofran (my savior!), and pain meds for the aches that were wracking my body. They released Miles before they released me, so Jesse took him home and came back for me. I spent the next day, Friday, in bed.

Friday night I was on my own with the boys overnight because Jesse’s BFF was visiting and had driven an obscenely long distance to visit from Virginia for plans they’d made 8 months earlier. Emmett went to bed as planned. Miles wasn’t having it, and laid on my chest drinking Pedialyte while we watched Perfect Pitch together.

Around 10:30, when Miles and I were getting ready for bed, Emmett woke up screaming bloody murder. I prepared bottles for both of them and laid them down so I could eat something for the first time in 48 hours. They cried. I left my ramen on the stove to grow cold and remain uneaten. I somehow dragged our giant bean bag chair from the family room into the boys room, through two doorways and over a gate, no less, and curled up on it with both of them, planning to settle in for the night. Miles immediately went to sleep, head on my left shoulder, nestled against my ribs. Emmett threw up down my shirt. Just a small amount. I thought it was because I let him cry too long (seriously I HAD to try to EAT something or I was going to pass out), and apologize profusely. He fell asleep with his head on my stomach as I scooped vomit out of my bra with a flannel receiving blanket.

If only I could have gotten him to throw up into a bucket instead of into my cleavage…

I managed to get out from under Miles, leaving him on the bean bag, and tried to transition Emmett to his crib. No go. He screamed inconsolably until he projectile vomited, Exorcist style, all over my chest, down my shirt, up to my chin, in my hair, down my arms. As I tried to get from the carpeted bedroom to the tiled bathroom down the hall, I could hear and feel it plopping off of me onto the rug.

It.

Just.

Kept.

Coming.

That kid threw up more in one shot than I did in an entire day of vomiting. I don’t even know how it was physically possible. It went on for at least 2 minutes, and he was so upset.

I grabbed a beach towel and spread it on the floor, plopping him in middle to wait while I peeled off my pukey clothes and dropped them in the sink. Then I stripped him to his diaper and wiped us both down with flushable “personal care wipes” as best I could. I left him on a different towel in the family room long enough to wipe myself down more and put on new clothes, and then re-dressed him with a new diaper and PJs. I rocked him to sleep and eased him into his crib. I crawled around in the dark, picking up as much vomit as I could from the rug without actually being able to see anything. Miles was still asleep on the bean bag chair. I turned up the monitor really loud, closed the door, and slunk to my bed. It was 2:30 a.m.

At 4, Emmett woke up screaming again. I raced into their room and snatched him out of bed, trying to get him out of the room before he woke Miles (who was now on the floor in front of the bean bag chair, curled up like a dinosaur egg on top of a blanket nest). No dice. Miles woke up and grabbed my leg as I tried to make an exit, so rather than fall I just sat down on the floor and pulled both of them into my lap. After Emmett spent 10 minutes screaming like I’d set him on fire, I figured out that he was hungry. Miles started signing “milk,” too, so I put him in his crib with a bottle and took Emmett to the living room with his so I could keep him from drinking it too fast and throwing up again. After he finished his 4 ounces, he fell asleep in my arms on the couch. Miles was still screaming in his bed, obviously not interested in his bottle. I eased Emmett onto the couch with a towel under him and left him there before rescuing Miles and taking him to my bed. It was almost 5 a.m. I laid in bed, fielding Miles’ kicks, until finally drifting off around 6. Around 6:30 I woke from a nightmare in which a zombie invasion turned my children into smelly screaming creatures that followed me around projectile vomiting on me. I almost cried when I remembered it actually was real life and not just a dream.

I’m too old to function on a 3 hours of sleep.

Before leaving Emmett, I had closed all of the baby gates and the bathroom door and cranked up the monitor as high as it would go so I would hear him if he woke. (The boys’ room is right off our family room.) He slept until 8:20. I spent 20 minutes with him before I  heard Miles crying in my room. I went back in to get Miles and found him sitting on the side of my bed with my cell phone in one hand and a now-empty can of ginger ale in his other hand. He flung the can on the floor and raced down the bed toward me, waving the phone and screaming. It was 8:40 a.m.

That was literally the longest night of my life, and this has been the longest 10 days of my life. I haven’t thrown up since they gave me Zofran and fluids (and a prescription to bring home with me), but I also haven’t had a normal bowel movement since then either. Ahh, memories. I feel like I got hit by a truck. I worked exactly 2 days last week, and this week I feel like I’m just phoning it in. I continue to have very little appetite, but I’m forcing myself to go about my daily life including eating, working, exercising, etc. I just feel like crap.

I openly contend that any mom who claims to “just love every minute of being a mom” is a lying liar who’s full of crap and lies. I love my kids. I do not love cleaning up their vomit and diarrhea, or having it forcibly applied to my person. I love my kids, but I do not love being up all night with them screaming directly in my ear. I love being their mom. I do not love every minute of it. And I sure didn’t love the last week and a half, when they were sick, I was sick, and everything completely sucked.

I’ve complained in the past about parents who try to tell you your life will suck when you have kids. This must be what they feel like all the time. No wonder they hate parenthood. If this was my constant reality, I wouldn’t be much of a fan either.