It’s been a weekend of barf around here, so if you’re squeamish, you may need to pop open a ginger ale.  I would say “You may want to skip this post,” but I would NEVER encourage my readers to skip my posts.  Who wins?

Thursday night, I ate some salt and vinegar Kettle Chips.  Odie calls them “douche chips.” Cute, no?  And, you see, I ate the whole bag.  I started this detox where I’m off white flour and sugar.  Those foods are addictive to me and I can’t moderate them.  Elimination seems to be the only thing that works for me.  I reasoned that potato chips have neither flour, nor sugar, so I should be able to have some.

Fried foods are another “trigger” food for me. I never leave a french fry or an onion ring on a plate, no matter how full I am, no matter how cold they are.  It was a pure addict move, thinking “I can just have a few potato chips and then put the bag away.” I put the bag away like 4 times, but I kept taking it back out.  Then I got to that, “Well, I can’t just put a handful of chips away.  I may as well finish the bag” point, and finish I did.

So in the middle of the night, early Friday morning, when the overwhelming nausea hit me, I wasn’t surprised or suspicious.  Potato chips always nauseate me.  It’s another reason I usually stay away (when my addict mind isn’t driving the bus).  I lay awake most of the rest of the night, fighting the barfies.  Friday was Odie’s last day of work for the 2009-10 school year.  Hip, hip, hooray! After he left for work, Baby V woke up and I got up with her and the swoons hit me.  I made it through her diaper change, barely, before I dumped her in her crib, ran for the bathroom, and met those potato chips again.  I almost didn’t make it through the diaper change.  I even said, out loud, “Dear Lord, help me, please.”  And I am not, in general, a believer in said Lord.  In vino, veritas.  In puko, beliefitas.

I will spare you further details that led me to believe I was experiencing the after effects of a major potato chip binge.  I felt so much better after the purge.  For about 20 minutes.  Then I was struck by fever, chills, body aches and a migraine.  The hardest part was I really had to hold it together for my baby.  I had no help on Friday and no one to call for help.  My sister lives near by, but she has a child and I didn’t want to expose her to my horrible virus.  My friends were all working or home with their own children.  My stepmom was busy.  I couldn’t call Odie away from his last day of work where he was grading finals and rushing to finish final grades before a deadline.

It was a day of clock watching and minute counting.  The most difficult time was 1:00 to 3:30.  I sat on the couch, watching Baby V play with her toys and I literally looked at the clock 30 times in that final hour.  “Please, please hurry,” I begged Odie out loud in my Luke to Leia way.  “Odie… HEAR ME.”

Sunday morning, it hit Odie.  Sunday night, it hit Baby V.  She fussed all evening, but I assumed it was just a new tooth.  She finally fell asleep around 9 and woke up puking at 12.

Before I had a child, I couldn’t imagine how parents dealt with baby barf.  Just the thought of another human being vomiting makes most of us want to barf.  Not to mention the smell.  But when it’s your own child, you’re overcome with empathy, grief, tenderness, and the overwhelming feeling that you MUST take care of this little person.  I have had my heart broken and resized a thousand times this past 14 months, but hearing my daughter crying and moaning, “Mommmmmyyyyy!” in between gushes of vomit was the worst yet.  Some welcome comic relief came when she looked up, saw her daddy huddling nearby with concern and said, very dejectedly, “Hi.” 

The doctor says we may be in for a few days of this.  Even though it ravaged Odie and me in 48 hours, apparently that isn’t true of the little ones.  Damn.

But I won’t look on the dark side here.  The Netherlands beat Slovakia.  Brazil beat Chile. And Odie doesn’t have to go to work today or tomorrow, or 10 weeks of tomorrows after THAT.