To borrow from Stephen King

Oh boy, where do I even begin? Maybe I should mention how someone always gets sick before our annual Christmas party, and I debate, "should we cancel, or not cancel? Cancel or not?" This year I was thrown for a loop. Nobody got sick! Amazing! Rejoice! I LIKE this having a Christmas party in the summer weather and fewer viruses and not competing with shopping and...

Let me tell you about this week. Dada's been in Maryland since Monday. He got home last night, but still. Two mornings ago, Liam bounces out of bed and I go to see if Carrie is also awake. She is. She tells me that she threw up three times in her dreams. I ask if she also threw up in real life. She informs me, "yes. In my curtains."

It's been that kind of week.

Yes, you read that right. That previous night, I'd turned off the A/C finally and opened up the house. Since the curtain rods in the kids' rooms both had been "helped" off the wall more than once, I've given up and used push pins to hang sheets up as curtains. Since I opened the window in their room, I'd draped the sheets over the headboard of Liam's bottom bunk. She'd vomited over the end of her headboard and the curtains caught it nicely before it hit the floor. Not a huge deal. Simply unpin the push pins, shake out the excess into the trash, and wash, dry, and rehang. She went back to bed until 10 AM which is about unheard of for her.

She had a fever of 101.1 which was gone the next day and today she is her completely usual spirited self. Her curtains are fresh and clean.

Today is sheet day. Fridays I usually wash all our sheets. The kids love to help. This morning Liam was the pokey one and didn't get me his sheets until about 10 AM. Mine were already done and back on the bed at that point. (It helped that they just did the washer & dryer this time... I prefer to hang them outside, but our party tent is in the way of my clothesline space. Dada is secretly rejoicing over this.) At any rate, the kids' beds are re-made and I have her on the couch downstairs with me while he's on the top bunk for his break. About an hour into break I hear a THUMP. Carrie rolls over, looks at me and says, "what's that?" I say, more than a little bit aggravated-ly, "that's what it sounds like when you guys crash around upstairs!"

Then I hear this pitiful, near-tears voice claim, "Mama, I pooped!"

Here's where the title comes in. If you've read a fairly serious amount of Stephen King, you've probably more than once come across something like this:

Mainers have an expression for when something goes wrong, stops working, or goes to hell. They like to say, "the damn thing shit the bed," and everyone knows what they mean.

That's roughly translated by me. Since I've never been to New England and don't know anyone from Maine, I can't say for sure, but if it works for Stephen King, it's good enough for me. I've always thought it was a funny saying. I've secretly always wanted to hear someone use it in context. Sometimes I wish real life was fiction. I'd love to be an Elf in Middle Earth, but that's another story altogether...

I've SEEN the damn thing shit the bed, and it ain't pretty. I had a talk with myself last night about that verse in the Bible where you give thanks in all circumstances, so while I was cleaning the carpet and the sheets and the ladder to the bunk bed and the mattress cover and the boy, I was thankful for my washer and dryer, thankful for this sweet baby who looked all the world like he was listening when I told him he needed a nap so I could clean up a mess, and mostly thankful that I'd had the boy poop last night before bed or dear God, what a mess I WOULD have had. The one I DID have was quite enough, thanks very much.

So now when someone says they've had a shitty day, I will completely be able to empathize. I don't know how nurses do it. You nurses have all my admiration, and for reasons more than that.

So no, nobody was sick before the Christmas party, but this week of recovery from said Christmas party has been unexpected, to say the least. Oh, there's my washer beeping at me.