Let Me Count the Days

How many times can the family get the flu in a week? Oh, let me count the days. The week before last, on Thursday morning, Jaden complained that his stomach hurt. He does this quite often so I usually just brush it off unless there are other symptoms, which I did that morning. Then, as I was driving him to my parent's house so my mom and I could go on a hike, he repeated his complaint, and as I looked back his lips turned white. He looked like he was about to hurl any minute. I warned him not to throw up in the car, and eased the petal down, grateful that we were almost there.

We arrived at my parent's house vomit-free and Jaden seemed to have recovered. I wasn't sure what to do, my mom had already planned the hike and was looking forward to it all week, and we were just about to leave. So with encouragement from my dad and an eager push out the door from my mom, we left. When we got home my dad reported that Jaden had thrown up, but then felt much better. He acted fine the rest of the day and I thought the episode was done.

The next Tuesday night my stomach started to hurt. The whole experience culminated with my head over the toilet at about five the next morning, and slowly concluded with a day spent in bed. Again, I thought the experience was finished.

A few days later, I wake up in the middle of the night to the always unwelcome sound of vomiting. It was poor Jaden again! He was fine by morning, and I counted myself lucky. Ha ha, silly me. The next night was puncuated with a quite different sound. I woke up to hear Carter screaming. When I checked on him he showed me that his pants were wet. Thinking that he had wet himself through his diaper I changed his diaper and pjs and tucked him back in bed. It was when I tucked his blanket around him that I discovered that one of the corners of the blanket was also wet, and couldn't be from a leaky diaper. I asked him if he had thrown up, and he calmly nodded. Poor guy! When the scream was repeated in a few minutes, I stripped him down again, armed myself with a bowl, a towel and nausea medicine, and set up a little bed for him beside my bed. Luckily he didn't throw up again, though he didn't sleep much and groaned and squirmed a lot. Again, he was fine by morning, but I wasn't taking any chances and kept the whole family home from church.

Everyone except Jeff has now had the flu at least once, and Jaden twice. You'd think we were done, right? Nope. Jaden threw up again, the next night! I swear we do wash our hands and we have been sanitizing, and disinfecting, etc. I just hope that this is finally the end. I have no idea how Jeff escaped, except that he has with every little bug out family has gotten since we moved out here. He has this special super-strong hand sanitizer they give him at work that kills bacteria for two hours after applied, but we all use it when we get sick, and it only seems to work on him! I guess it only works on cops.

Almost two weeks later, after many loads of laundry, much toilet cleaning, and carpet cleaning, a missed presidency meeting, activity, birthday party, and church, we've now had on vomit-free night. Are we done? I guess we'll see...