Month: February 2010

Due to a run-in with the stomach flu, our household has had a week of semi-isolationism.  When I was out of town last weekend, Bryan got to experience our very first child throwing up incident.  Actually, it was the second.  The first was on a trans-continental flight, and can be read about here.  But that was more of a gagging incident.

At 2:47am on Saturday, January, 31; Bryan posted the following to Facebook:

Sylvia and I are getting matching T-shirts made up: “I survived the crib-barfing of 01/30/10”.

Unfortunately, the crib barfing incidents were followed by the dad’s-bed barfing incident, followed by several sitting on dad’s lap barfing into a bucket incidents.  She fell asleep at 4:30am and has been barf-free since.

When I got back home on Monday, Sylvia told me in excitement, “I pehped!  Pehp.  Sylva bed.  Pehp.  Daddy bed.  Phep.  Daddy pillow!”  She pulled me into my room, crawled up on the bed, pulled back the covers, and showed me where the “pehpping” took place.  Understandably, it made quite an impression on her.

Bryan caught Sylvia’s bug on Tuesday night and was totally out of commission for two days.  He’s better now and back at work today.

After Bryan got sick, I decided to attempt to sterilize the house.  Jessica brought me some Lysol cleaner, I pulled my steam cleaner out of the basement, and I tackled each room in the house with a fierce cleaning energy.  By the end of the day on Wednesday, my hands were red and dry from all the cleaning and hand washing I’d been doing.  Andrew’s were too.  But my house was cleeeeaaaaan.

Andrew held up all week, and was healthy for preschool, but this morning, he had a bit of an unfortunate experience in the bathroom.  Looks like he’s got a touch of the bug.  Sylvia and I have canceled nearly all our out-of-the-house activities this week.  Wednesday night, she was up eight times in the night howling with a painful tummy.  And her diaper situation has gone from normal to very unfortunately not normal.

So it looks like we’ll be canceling our weekend plans as well.

I’m just really, really hopeful that the germs will all have dissipated by Monday.  Granny comes to town on Tuesday, and I want us to be germ-free by then.  Oh, and that means that I also need to stay healthy.  Please, please!!

Thinking back, the last time Bryan had the stomach flu was in 1999.  And the last time I had a stomach bug was in Botswana in 1997.  Oooo, that was a doozy.  Liz and Janet, thank you for helping me through that one.  Neither of my kids have ever thrown up before.  So I’ll just be thankful for the amazing run of luck we’ve had up to this point.  And we’ll keep drawing and reading books and watching videos until health is restored and we can rejoin society!

I had a great time on my western trip.  Thanks to Bryan for caring for the kids (one of whom threw up all night) so I could go have fun for the weekend!

I finished the book The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kenison, and it was so good!  It really made me step back and acknowledge that while some of the hours and weeks of tending to small children can feel endless that this is a finite and precious time.  Here are some more quotes I just had to share:

The hardest part of being a parent may be learning to live with the fact that there are so many things that we simply can’t control, so much of the journey that is not our doing at all, but rather the work of the gods, the unfolding of destiny, fate.  We give birth to our children, we love and cherish them, but we don’t form or own them, any more than we can own the flowers blooming at our doorsteps or the land upon which we build our homes and invest our dreams.  We may tend the garden for a while, take our brief turn upon the land, nurture the children delivered into our arms, but in truth we possess none of these things, nor can we write any life story but our own.  It’s a truth I had to confront right away, one that I’m still still struggling to accept seventeen years later.

and later

Now, all these years later, as one son prepares to enter high school and the other, unbelievably, to leave it, I often find myself thinking back to the years when they were both still small.  Summer days then began with pancakes and just-picked blueberries for breakfast and might end with made-up stores or shadow pictures on a bedroom wall.  In between, there were walks to the creek, picnic lunches on the back porch, stacks of books carried out to a quilt on the grass, a plastic wading pool that could enchant two little boys for hours, a shallow red dish full of filmy bubble liquid, and the magic wand that once waved wobbly, iridescent globes into the air, each one carrying an invisible fairy off to a distant sea.

It’s still hard for me to believe that all of this has vanished, that those times are truly gone for good.  How fresh and green they are, still, in my memory — the intense, constatnt physical intimacy as well as the countless peanut-butter sandwiches, bedtime stories, earaches and scraped knees, baking soda volcanoes, snowball fights, trips to town for ice-cream cones.  Yet I am grateful to have had all of those moments, for they are the ones that have turned out, in the end, to be the most precious recollections of all, though they went unrecorded, unwritten, unremarked on at the time.

Our photo albums from those days are full of pictures of birthday cakes and holiday celebrations, vacation trips and family adventures, piano recitals and baseball games.  But the memories I find myself sifting through the past to find, the ones that I would now give anything to relive, are the ones that no one ever thought to photograph, the ones that came and went as softly as a breeze on a summer afternoon.

No picture, or home video, or diary entry can begin to capture the nubbly texture, subtle tones, and secret shades of a family’s life as it is from one hour, or day, or season, to the next.  It has taken a while, but I know it now–the most wonderful gift we had, the gift I’ve finally learned to cherish above all else, was the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days.

Reading this book, I mostly thought of my two little ones, but in re-reading these passages, I also found myself nostalgic for my own childhood.  For the easy camaraderie I had with my brothers and sister, the way that we were all so entwined in each others’ lives.

I think my mom lived her life trying as hard as she could to cherish the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days.  At her funeral, Terry read her favorite excerpt from her favorite play, Old Town. You can read it here.

I don’t think we can be reminded too many times how wonderful life is.  I’m glad I had a mom who helped share that lesson with me every day.