Bad is Bad

Recently, Kathy and I have been in a nice little parenting groove. For the past couple months, Leah and Riley have been pretty darn happy campers -- sleeping well, eating well, pooping well, playing well. I wouldn’t say it’s gotten “easy” exactly, but we’ve gotten to the point where we sorta feel like we almost know what we’re doing. And of course you know what happens when you start to think you know what you’re doing…

Yep, this weekend, the other shoe dropped. And man, was it a big shoe. A big, Shaquille O’Neal sized shoe. A big, Shaquille O’Neal sized shoe filled with diarrhea and vomit. There's a nice image for you. Sorry about that.

Anyway, Leah and Riley both came down with some sort of stomach virus this weekend, and the results were most unpleasant. Unpleasant as in I got vomited on three times this weekend and got poop on me more times than I care to count. This weekend marks the first time in my life I’ve had to clean vomit out of my hair and from behind my ears. And for the record, I don’t recommend it.

This weekend reminded me of sitting through a really horrible movie, like, say, Grease 2. At first, the movie is bad, and it’s physically painful to sit through. But then the movie gets so bad that it becomes funny, and you find yourself laughing at all the horribleness. But eventually the horribleness reaches a point where it’s just, well, horrible, and that’s when it really gets painful. You sit there with your Adrian-Zmed-induced headache getting worse and worse until you finally decide to end the pain by either running screaming out of the theater or hurling your DVD player out the window.

This weekend was just like that. When Leah first vomited on me, it was, let’s face it, gross. Then things started spiraling more and more out of control. We’d just finish cleaning up after Leah, and immediately Riley would make a mess, so we’d clean up that mess, and immediately Leah would make a mess again, and so we’d have to clean up that. And so on and so on in an infinite loop. By the time Leah vomited on me the second time, I wasn’t really grossed out anymore, and the whole situation had become so off-the-chart ridiculous that it just became funny.

What made it funnier to me is that Leah and Riley weren’t the least bit unhappy about the whole thing. They weren’t actually acting sick at all. They would be smiling and babbling, then they’d pause for a few seconds to vomit all over the room like the Exorcist girl, then they’d grin sheepishly and go back to smiling and babbling. It was all quite adorable, if you don't count the whole vomiting and explosive diarrhea thing.

Even with the whole cuteness thing factored in, cleaning up vomit and poo gets old very fast, and by the time I got barfed on for the third time, I felt thoroughly and completely defeated. I wanted to just climb into bed and pull the covers over my head and wait for it all to go away. Except I couldn’t because I would've gotten baby-vomit all over the bed.

But then, finally, mercifully, the weekend came to an end. Like all bad movies do, even the one whose name we shall not mention.