It’s been feast or famine around here, hasn’t it?  Make sure to read the end – for the happy ending postscript.

And a fair warning – there are discussions of various gross bodily fluids in this post.  Feel free to skip if you don’t want to read about them.

Over a week ago, I took the kids to the Baltimore Museum of Art.  We had an errand to run down near there and our Friday morning was free. So we did our errand, and then went, had a really lovely time, and the kids came home with all kinds of stories to tell Nik.  Great, right?  Yay for me, the homebody who made the effort to take my kids somewhere and expose them to fine art!

Well, then Monday morning, Mark puked at the breakfast table.  And then he just kept puking, through the night and all the way up until late Tuesday night.  The rest of his digestive system was messed up too (I’ll leave the details of that to your imagination) and here we are, Saturday afternoon, and he’s just now starting to get back to his normal self.  It took until Thursday for him to start talking again and yesterday for him to even play a little bit by himself.

Basically, for five days, I had a 27-pound baby who wanted to nurse all the time like a newborn.  My body has been aching like it hasn’t in a long time, both from inactivity (all I’ve been doing is sitting and lying down with Mark) and from a crazy bad neckache that I managed to give myself Friday morning.

And, sadly, Ellie woke up throwing up in the middle of the night on Friday night.  She’s been sleeping basically all day today and seems to be handling it a bit better than Mark but clearly has the same stomach bug of doom that Mark did/does.

I’m calling this, “The Lost Week.”  All we’ve done is laundry and dishes.  Last night, miraculously, they were both asleep by 7:00 and so what did we do with our free time?  Clean the really messy house.

And really, I can’t definitely blame this thing on the BMA.  Two days before we were at the mom’s group at our church.  It’s clear that this bug has a long latency period so it’s very possible we got it there and not at the BMA.  But it’s sure hard for me to convince myself that the lovely day was worth it.

Enough complaining though.  I am so grateful to Nik’s mom who blessed us with lots of food and thankfully, we also had lots of leftovers in the fridge and the freezer.  We’ve pulled through.  Ellie was an absolute SAINT all week, spending eons of time playing alone while I was sitting/nursing/sleeping with Mark.  I just kept saying, “Bless you child!” And really, it could have been much worse.

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That’s as far as I got on Sunday afternoon.  Nik came home from his time away playing some tennis so rather than finish typing this blog post, I made the wise decision and took a lovely long hike in Double Rock Park – BY MYSELF, HOLDING NO CHILDREN.

Ellie woke up feeling pretty good yesterday morning and by today, both children are back to normal.  Both Nik and I didn’t feel great yesterday but we’re fine today and I think we’re out of this.  This morning, the children played by themselves, for almost a solid two hours.  It was heavenly to just be able to get some of my work done!!

Now that our house is relatively clean, I’ve been able to do some baking, and we’re getting back to normal, I’m feeling like I have a bit more perspective on my thoughts above.  I know it’s not worth it to sequester ourselves in an attempt to not get sick.  We will continue to do all that we usually do to keep ourselves healthy and I’m planning to redouble our efforts.  In the meantime, I’m going to savor and be grateful for every minute of health!

I’ll leave you with a couple shots of my walk.  It was a lovely day, near 50 degrees and the calm before the [not-so-big-and-crazy] snowstorm.