and then comes monday

early wednesday morning kylinn came down with a terrible (i mean terrible!) stomach virus which she may or may not have caught from the ross family. it cycled through the ross household in a 48-hour exposure = 15 hours illness equation, so after almost a week, they all had had some form of it. the following monday, we finally had the courage to spend time with them as the symptoms were gone and they had been feeling great for over a week. kylinn woke up in the middle of the night cranky and unable to sleep. within minutes she had covered her bed and everything within a two-foot circumference in nasty toddler vomit. "spilling" as she calls it.

after cleaning the mess, a bath and laundry at 4am, she was able to sleep for a couple more hours when the entire event repeated. this spilling cycle would continue every 20 minutes or so until 10am. after spilling both lunch and dinner, she was fine. we sanitized the house and felt good. we had survived the curse of the rotavirus.

now all along, my dear sister kept saying, "if you guys get it, you'll get it on friday." right. that works. i only have doctors appointments, a dan zanes concert at the dia that i am sooooo looking forward to, the annual tree lighting in campus martius, and josh's 2nd birthday party on saturday. right. friday would be great. on the other hand, if we did get it on friday, we could still make the party and that's the real priority.

and then i read this: the living, spreading virus remains active on human hands for at least 4 hours, on hard dry surfaces for 10 days, and on wet areas for weeks! so what does this mean, dr green? that we could potentially contaminate the pool party for 3-5 weeks? or we could have become contaminated from a pool, or countertops or restaurant, etc because these vicious suckers won't die? holy hell! dig me a bunker because i'm not coming out ever again.

so guess what? of course, adam and i come down with what we can only later refer to as the plague of death. adam started at 2am on friday, and i did at 4am. by 6am we had learned to synchronize our spilling schedules to coordinate which bathroom we would be occupying. vomiting is never fun, but when you have a toddler standing next to you, rubbing your back and saying "mommy, you spill? oh, it's okay. you be okay." it thankfully makes it slightly less awful. however, it did get much worse before it got better. adam was barely functioning enough to call into work at 7:30 and we weren't even able to get out of bed until 11am. by then, however, ky was going stir-crazy and finally convinced me to come downstairs. by 1pm, my mom (who had just recovered from the same illness) was able to come over and i went back to bed.

adam's 15-hour illness was more like 12 as when he finally got up, he felt great. i continued on this evil cycle of stomach acid and dry heaving until midnight, when i passed out in the kitchen, stood up in a state of panic and ran (why the hell would i run at full speed?) ran into the china cabinet thinking it was the hallway. so of course i fell back down on the kitchen floor and wondered why i heard wind chimes and why i was staring at the fridge. this time, i got up slowly, walked to the bathroom, and proceeded to go through the motions of spilling for five more minutes with no results. i finally went to bed and slept until 8:30 in the morning when i awoke with a full bladder. (what seven months pregnant and not waking up to go to the bathroom every 30 minutes? unheard of!) and believe that -yes- there is a god... i do believe that i am free of that lousy kidney stone for once and for all.

so even though this plague was seriously -by far- the most sick that adam and i have ever been, and the spilling attacks were more far painful than the transition phase of labor, getting rid of my kidney stone was a nice reward for having danced with the devil in the pale moonlight. although when i finally looked in the mirror the next day, i had a nice swollen bump on my nose and two black eyes from that fight with the cabinet. oh well, that's why god made concealer.

so needless to say, those appointments were postponed until tuesday, and we didn't make it downtown to the events. but we did get to joshie's party, and really, that's all that mattered.

god speed. lysol, clorox and hand sanitizer wishes to you all.