Blargh. Stomach flu - so much cheaper and more effective than a juice cleanse!

I'm not dead yet, but I kinda wish I was. I'm going to be annoyingly positive so I don't bring everyone else down:
Things I'm looking forward to today:
- shower - DONE
- fresh clothes -DONE
- brush teeth - DONE
- sleeping for more than 10 minutes straight, and not having to worry about waking up soiled -DONE
- getting rid of the sleep deprivation and dehydration symptoms - this headache can go fuck itself - DONE
- my next sip of water, because omg water is the best thing ever and I want more more more but can only drink a few drops every few minutes -DONE
- moaning in an empty house so I don't disturb anyone else with my torment
- cleaning out the stinky puke bucket
- maybe by lunchtime : applesauce!

ETA: dang, I've got most of my list done and it's not even 10am. Time for some celebratory applesauce!

Not exactly the trials of Job, but annoying all the same

Last week of July: My father doesn't feel so well for a few days and finally goes to the doctor, only to discover that he has pneumonia (again). Doctor puts him on a double shot of antibiotics, and he seems to be recovering well.

Friday, July 31: While searching for change to pay the toll on our way to the family reunion, I discover that my American Express card is not in its slot in my wallet. Frantic searching of my wallet and purse do not turn up the card, but I'm reasonably sure I just left it in the pocket of my pants when I got gas on Thursday.

Saturday, Aug. 1: My father passes out while taking a shower, gashing open his forehead and wrenching his shoulder. He's only marginally coherent when my mother finds him bleeding on the floor in the bathroom*, so he gets an ambulance ride to the hospital, where he gets eight stitches and gets held over for a couple of nights to try to figure out why he passed out. My mother doesn't call me with the news, since they don't know how severe the problem is, and it's not like I'm going to be able to do anything from Indiana, anyway.

Sunday, Aug. 2: I get to sit next to my grandmother at the family reunion. She does not say one coherent sentence the entire time she's there, but she does look pleased as punch to get a shiny package to unwrap for being the oldest attendee. When we get home from Indiana, I get my mother's message about my father being in the hospital. And my American Express card is not in my pants pocket. But nobody has charged anything on it since I bought gas last week, so I doubt it's been stolen.

Monday, Aug. 3: I go to the doctor to renew my prescriptions; he tells me I need to lose weight and that I shouldn't tell anyone how good my blood pressure is because I'd be a bad influence on them. And the nurse who draws my blood for routine testing strikes oil on the first try, yet still manages to leave a bruise the size of a 50-cent piece. My father is discharged from the hospital, and I talk to him while I hold the puke bucket for my daughter for the sixth or seventh time in less than two hours. And did I mention the puke in my bra? And my hair? And my hallway carpeting, all across the bathroom floor, and all over the bathtub?

Tuesday, Aug. 4: We stay home all day so Liza can recover her strength. Liza discovers that dry erase markers write really well on the family room carpeting. Liza's older friends from the neighborhood come over to do crafts with us, and I hear the saddest thing I've ever heard in my whole life: "You mean, it's okay for me to make stuff with the clay? My mother doesn't let me do crafts at home. She says it's too messy. ... Can I bring these back in a few days so I can paint them? I'm not allowed to paint at home." The girl is 10 years old. Meanwhile, Tuesday evening someone steals my iPod** out of my (unlocked) car. We got it for free, and I've been thinking of upgrading it anyway, but still ... I hate it when people violate my space. And they didn't even steal the $12 pack of batteries that were sitting right next to it, so they're obviously not very smart (or have never used those batteries before).

Wednesday, Aug. 5: I stay up late to finish the bodice of a dress I've been knitting for weeks for Liza, but when I get it off the needles and hold it up, it looks suspiciously wide. I try it on, and the chest area is too large for my waist, and the waist area of the dress is only slightly too tight for my hips. Whoops.

Thursday, Aug. 6: I wake up at 4:30, puking my guts out, only there's nothing in my stomach, so I get to dry heave about 400 bajillion times over the course of the day. Liza and I watch television continuously from 7am to 2:30pm; I'm so sick I don't even object to watching three hours of Barney videos back-to-back. I'm so sick, I don't blog. Or knit. Or sleep. I do, however, get lots of practice moaning and clutching my stomach. I'm so achy at bedtime that I have to take Tylenol just to get to sleep.

Friday, Aug. 7: Liza wakes me up at 2am and wants to cuddle. I'm too tired to go to her room, and Jason is sleeping downstairs to avoid The Plague, so I let her sleep with me. Liza wakes me up at 4am, having just peed all over herself (and my bed) for the first time in months. I send her back to her bed, pull back the covers over the wet spot, and go back to sleep. During the day, I recover enough to eat some soup and applesauce, and to clean up the squalor in my house. Liza is in rare form, refusing to do anything I ask and trying to find new and unusual ways to get in trouble. At one point she decided that the best way to get a piece of pink fuzz off of the cat was to cut off the cat's fur with a pair of scissors. And the cat let her. And she did it where I had already vacuumed. And the only reason the pink fuzz was there in the first place was because she had taken the scissors to her feather boa.

Saturday, Aug. 8: I'm feeling queasy again and it's raining, which means no visit to the Corn Festival for me today. Jason has taken Liza to the science center, and I'm trying to finish up some Lazy Mama business while not heaving on the poor lady's mermaid tail.

Yes, I know none of it is tragic. Jason has coworkers whose kids have been in surgery for various things this week, and other people have a lot more immediate and serious health issues than a stomach bug.

But still, daaaaaamn. This week has sucked donkey balls. And I can't even wallow in brownie-flavored self-pity, thanks to the queasiness (and my doctor ... asshole).

*So, did you get those stains out of the grout yet, Mom?

** It's a Shuffle, which uses a completely different docking/charging setup than any other MP3 player I've seen, so unless the thief already has one, he's going to have to buy one if he wants to change the songs on his "free" iPod. I hope he really enjoys the They Might Be Giants kids' tunes and Pinky Dinky Doo audiobooks. Rat bastard.

Getting back to our roots

When you return to Indiana for a family reunion, there's a cop at the state line who won't let you leave the state until you take a picture of your kid in a cornfield.

We made it there, saw most of the folks we had hoped to see, ate most of the food we had hoped to eat, and made it back again, all in one weekend. We even had an extra day to play in the hotel pool and visit the zoo in Fort Wayne ... more on that when I've got the energy to download the pictures and edit the video.

Right now, I'm more interested in keeping up with Little Miss Pukes-A-Lot, who suddenly started throwing up all over me in the hallway at bedtime. Any day when I have to use the phrase, "Hold still while I pour the vomit out of my bra," is just destined to be memorable. On the positive side of things, at least she's getting lots (and lots ... and lots) of practice with the puke bucket!

Liza tells a story

"This is the sky, and this is the sun. This is the deck, and the grass. This is a little squirrel hopping along, and see this red stuff over there? That's the squirrel puke. And this brown thing is a butterfly flying along with the puke bucket, and the squirrel puke just swings into the puke bucket.

The End"

Parenthack - more puke bucket innovations!

Remember the puke bucket? Yeah, it's been in pretty frequent use around here since I got The Call from Liza's preschool yesterday. You know, the one when you find out that your daughter has managed to decorate the entire hallway with vomit, despite showing no signs of illness when you dropped her off an hour earlier ...

Anyhow, since I was home alone (and I care more about the carpets in this house than I did about the wood floors at the house in Kentucky), I decided I needed to try to manage the cleanup a little better than I did last time she was ill. It was just annoying that by the time she got finished puking, I comforted her and got her cleaned up, and I got the trashcan clean, she was pretty much ready to puke again.

The solution: plastic grocery bags. I lined the puke bucket with four or five of them, and then when she got sick I could just clean her up, throw the paper towels in the bag, and throw the soiled bag in the trash - and there was a clean one waiting in the can, all ready to go. Total cleanup time: about 15 seconds, and Liza never had to be without the bucket.

The only caveat is that you need to check the bags for holes BEFORE you use them in the bucket, especially if you have to carry them any distance to get to the trashcan. The alternative is just too gross to discuss.

Oh, and here's an actual conversation between me and my daughter today.

Me: "So, did I do an okay job helping you yesterday when you were sick?"
Liza: "Mommy, you're really smart about the puke bucket."
Me: "You mean, I've got good technique?"
Liza: "You were smart about the puke and the germs didn't get on me or the couch or the floor or the cat or you. That was really cool."

Now, if I can just convince her that hyperventilating does NOT make your body stop wanting to puke, I'll be fine. The sound of her wheezing (on purpose) her way around the house, followed by the gagging and retching ... ugh, it's going to take weeks to get that out of my head.

Blargh

After two days of editing, researching, re-editing, nail-biting, and market research, I am about to send out my first freelance writing submission since 2004.

I don't know whether this requires alcohol or the puke bucket.

Perhaps both, just to be certain.

Turn a baby washtub into a stain removal center

I should have written this up ages ago, but I keep forgetting.

One of the first official "hacks" I performed as a parent involved the cheap little plastic washtub we got from the hospital - you know, the one they use to give the baby a bath at the hospital, and they can't sterilize them, so you get to take it home with you. Since we already had an official baby bathtub we'd gotten as a shower gift, we ended up turning the hospital tub into a stain removal center.

We kept the tub on the floor in our laundry room, and whenever one of Liza's pieces of clothes got stained, we'd throw it in the tub instead of the regular laundry. When the tub was full, I'd use a stain stick on all the stains, throw a scoop of OxyClean Baby into the tub, and fill it up with the hottest water I could get. I'd throw the clothes in and go so something else for an hour. When I was ready to start the clothes in the main washer, I'd pour the entire contents of the tub - clothes, water, and all - into the washer, along with the unstained clothes and detergent. And darned if 90% of the stains didn't come out!

This method had two benefits over some of my other options, which included soaking the clothes in a sink or in the washer itself. First of all, who wants to soak poop-stained clothes in a sink you're going to use for other stuff? Our laundry was in our bathroom, so I would have had to soak poopy pants in the sink where I wash my face and brush my teeth. Ick. And soaking clothes in the washer would have tied up the washer for an hour and used a lot more water.

Now that Liza's older and we don't have quite so many stains, the tub has been pressed into duty for a few other things, including puke bucket and place to put the kid when she's pooped in the tub. Not bad for an ugly plastic washtub we got for free!

Greetings, Parenthackers!

Okay, I'm a day late and a few hundred visitors short on this one, but here goes ...

Howdy, folks! Glad to have you here! Please don't let the recent frequent occurrences of the word "puke" throw you off - I guarantee we're not contagious anymore.

I use this site as a way to keep my widely scattered friends and family updated on what's going on in my life, whether it's my kid's latest accomplishments or the annoying thing that happened at the grocery store this morning. Yes, it's a mommy blog, but at least I'm occasionally funny.

Over the next few months I'll be detailing the ups and downs of moving to a new home in a new state with a husband who travels a lot on business and a not-quite-two-year-old who dislikes transitions of any sort. Oh, and did I mention the impending potty training? Yeah, it's gonna be a fun ride. At least, that's what I keep telling myself every night before the sleeping pills kick in ... Anyway, I'm guessing there's going to be at least a few amusing stories in here somewhere, so check back often.


- Gretchen, Mistress of the Puke Bucket

Puke bucket update

So Friday Liza managed to "decorate" the entire ice cream aisle at Kroger with the contents of her stomach, so we visited the pediatrician that afternoon. As far as the doctor can tell, Liza's been suffering from a post-stomach-virus case of lactose intolerance, which is apparently pretty common. So every time she'd get sick, we'd take her off of dairy products (and most other food), and she'd get better, but about the time we'd reintroduce her regular diet, she'd puke again. Sounded good to me.

Now that we have a diagnosis, all we have to do is make it through two weeks of "complete abdominal rest," otherwise known as "you can't eat anything other than bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast." TWO WEEKS. Which includes one househunting trip to Cleveland, and our move to temporary housing. Oh, this is gonna suck.

My mother is here helping take care of the kiddo while I clean like a maniac, and she's trying her best to be helpful. But when the doctor says "absolutely no dairy products for two weeks," I'm pretty sure that includes butter on cinnamon toast. And when you start talking about making pumpkin muffins for the kid, don't get upset when I remind you that pumpkins aren't bananas, rice, applesauce or toast. It's hard on both of us, because we're both the sort of people who offer food to fix problems, so it's killing us that the kid is sick and we can't even make her proper chicken soup. Plus, I've got a six-pack of organic kid yogurt that we bought during the fateful grocery trip on Friday, all of which we're going to have to pass on to another kid because mine's not going to be able to eat it until sometime next month.

But, at least her appetite is back, and it's not like she's dying or anything. She may want to after two weeks of bananas, rice, applesauce and toast, but it's not likely to actually happen.

Someday I'll learn to keep my mouth shut

Last night was a nightmare. She stayed asleep until midnight, then woke up puking and screaming. We cleaned her up, she puked again. We cleaned her up, she puked again. We were out of clean sheets for her bed, so we let her sleep in the (only slightly) foul ones, and it's a good thing she did, because she threw up six more times, and she's not very good about hitting the new, improved puke bucket.

I learned last time she was sick that we've got about 15 seconds of warning before stuff starts flying, so at 2am I'd hear a cough on the monitor, shoot out of bed, run into her room, grab the bucket, and (hopefully) catch the worst of it. By 3 I had given up and was just sleeping in there, so when I'd hear the cough I could just roll over and grab the bucket. I don't know that it was any more effective, but at least I didn't have to vault over the cats in the hallway.

Meanwhile, I was having one of those nights when I worry about everything remotely stressful in my life to the point where I make myself sick, and every time I would shut off the running commentary in my head and just about fall asleep, she'd start yakking again. Jason was put on "rinse out the bucket and throw out these wipes" duty, so I think between the three of us we got maybe four hours of sleep last night.

Then the diarrhea started.

And she puked up most of a can of ginger ale when I put her down for her nap at 11:30. That's 11 times in 11 hours, in case you were wondering. Poor thing.

And, of course, today we have a prospective real estate agent coming by to check out the house, so I've been throwing smelly sheets in the washing machine as fast as I can, and checking to make sure nothing smells too bad anywhere else. Yep, gonna be a long couple of weeks until we get out of here.

Remember this next time the puking starts ....

By the time Liza was done with her pukefest yesterday, I finally had it figured out. Just before she'd get sick, she'd get agitated and start trying to crawl up the front of me, and she'd start drooling and swallowing a lot. I even managed to keep the last, um, emission from hitting anything other than the inside of an old plastic cookie dough container. Bulls-eye!

Liza wasn't thrilled by the whole "puking in a bucket" thing, though, and she kept trying to push it away from her face. She was pleased by the result, though, and when she was done she kept looking down at the front of her pajamas, obviously thinking, "Wait, aren't I supposed to be wet and smelly right now? What's up with this?"

I think next time I'll put a sticker on the bottom of the bucket and tell her to look at it when she's getting sick. Hey, it worked at the photographers to get her to look at the fake flowers she was holding - maybe it will work here, too. If nothing else, it will be amusing to see Elmo all covered in half-digested Pedialyte. When you're cleaning up that much puke, you've got to get your jollies wherever you can :)

Eeeeeeeewwwwww

Liza's got the pukies (don't worry, no pictures today). So far today the laundry total includes : carseat, carseat cover, straps, and buckles; Liza's jacket, mittens, expensive pants, expensive sweater, socks, and necklace; Jason's sweatshirt, my jeans, my socks; my fleece jacket, my fleece pants; four pairs of Liza's pajamas; my watch; the wool rug in the family room; the washable rug by the back door; about 14 different places on the wood floor (including one where there's a 1/8" gap between the boards, and I had to try to fish out the worst of the chunks with a table knife); the kitchen sink; the bathtub (because I gave Liza a bath after the first episode, stupid me); and probably a few more places I've either forgotten or haven't found yet. And it's only lunchtime.

Some observations:

• We have hardwood floors in every room. There are two rugs on the first floor, and the kid has managed to cover both of them. The cats do the same thing. Is there some sort of puke magnet built into the rugs that I wasn't warned about when I bought them?
• What was the thought process that made it seem like a good idea to include hideously stain-inducing red food coloring in a rehydration solution? Someone without a carpet puker did this ... or maybe it's a conspiracy led by the carpet industry.
• Why is it that the kid can be happily sipping Pedialyte for an hour, watching videos and asking to be tickled, but as soon as she gets down and makes it to a virgin piece of carpeting, the fountain starts again? Why, why, why?
• Why, when called for emergency backup at lunchtime, would my husband choose to bring home food from Taco Bell, the place I've only been able to eat at once in the past two years because a particularly bad bout of stomach flu had me puking up the same burrito for a day and a half? Why, why, why? Dude, the smells of vomit and Taco Bell are now so firmly linked in my brain that the restaurant is dead to me. Dead, I tell you.
• Essential supplies for toddler pukefest: large sheet of vinyl-coated fabric that used to be the stain-catcher under the high chair (used to protect sofa or floor from puke); plastic bucket to fruitlessly try to catch puke (even if you get there in time, she'll be so pissed that she's puking that she'll slap it away, so you'd better have a good hold on it); as many rolls of paper towels as you can find in the house; as many pairs of easy-to-change clothes as you can find (for both of you - zip-fronts work best, as they keep the puke out of your hair when you're changing); as many DVDs as you own or can beg, borrow, or steal. We've watched two hours of Baby Einstein and Curious Buddies today; this afternoon I'm going to indoctrinate Liza with the finer points of the Muppet Show.
• Oh, and did I mention that my stomach doesn't feel so great, either? Hopefully I'll wait until she's done before I start ... I'm having a tough time keeping up with the level of cleaning now, I can't imagine trying to keep up while being sick myself.
• On the positive side, Liza has learned new words today, including "puke" and "sick," and has gotten plenty of practice saying "YUCK YUCK YUCK" at the top of her lungs. Nothing like a little stomach flu to improve a kid's vocabulary.