Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Linda Blair paid us a midnight visit

You know that feeling you get when you say something aloud -- then immediately wish you could swallow those ill-considered words because you know you've just put a horrible jinx on yourself?

Yes. Well. That's exactly the feeling I had when I bragged to my mother last month that my 2 1/2 year old Milo had *never* been sick. Not to the point of vomiting, at least.

Fast forward to last Thursday: Rob and I were awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of Milo crying. Not so unusual -- he wakes up once or twice a week and calls for us because his precious blankie has fallen to the floor (or, much more rarely, because he himself has fallen to the floor).

So I got up, stumbling and squinty-eyed, and made my way to his room. When I opened the door, there was Milo sitting in the middle of his bed, wailing as if he'd just awakened to discover himself on a sinking raft in the middle of shark-infested waters..

"Mommy!" he sobbed. "My tummy hurts! And I spilled something on my pillow!"

Insert ominous music here...

Sure enough, the little guy had thrown up all over his bed. And himself. And -- horrors! -- his beloved blankie. So while I got him changed and held him close (even as he continued to vomit into hastily grabbed towels), reassuring him that he was all right and hadn't done anything wrong, Rob stripped the bed and threw everything into the washing machine. Even the blankie, the presence of which Milo usually considers to be as necessary to his survival as oxygen.

But the poor boy was so zonked out by the whole experience that he just wanted it to GO AWAY. "I want to sleep! I want to sleep!" he cried, over and over again. So when the vomiting was done, and the sheets and pillows were replace with clean ones, we laid him down and let him sink immediately back into sweet, sweet oblivion.

For Rob and I, of course, it took a lot longer. We were so wired by the experience that we couldn't relax enough to fall asleep, and every rasping cough from Milo's room jolted us back into heart-pounding alertness. The positive side to this was that we were still awake when the washing machine finished its cycle, so Rob figured he may as well get up and threw everything into the dryer, just in case we needed to change Milo's sheets again in the middle of the night.

So when Milo woke up a couple hours later, crying for his blankie, I was overjoyed to run downstairs and grab a clean, soft, warm fuzzy dry blankie. "This'll trump anything he gets for Christmas," I thought. And when I put it into his outstretched arms, his chortle of glee told me that we were all going to live to see the dawn.

Sure enough, when I went into his room to get him the next morning, he greeted me with a cheerful, "Milo's feeling better, Mommy! Not sick anymore!" And then he proceeded to scarf down an entire waffle and half an egg. Ah, the resilience of youth.

... I certainly wish *I'd* been able to recover as quickly when the same damned stomach bug struck me down on Saturday night.

See all the fun you're missing, all you childless people out there?