You wanna know what isn’t fashionable? A stomach bug. Particularly a stomach bug that left Pennsylvania and stayed alive for 2 full days of travel and presented itself alive and well on the southern most tip of our country. We’ve kept five children alive this long, why wouldn’t those same nurturing qualities be afforded to a nasty stomach virus. Maybe 2 days before departure when our 7 year old was throwing up I might have mentioned that this trip could be a bad idea…but in my husband’s defense, we have had pukers at the beginning of our travels before and somehow no one else was afflicted. So we were hoping for more of the same.
Not so. Iris became violently ill our first night in the hotel. At one point she was headed for the bathroom and didn’t quite make it, therefore vomiting all over the closed toilet bowl lid and surrounding area. I had to wonder, is this the type of information you share at check out? So they could perhaps do a more thorough cleaning of the room? I’ll leave you with that discussion point for a moment…
By morning Iris seemed much better and the entire group was optimistic. After another full day of driving we arrived in sunny Florida.
The next day was filled with bike rides and lizard chasing and swimming and boat rides and a delightful evening in Disney Springs. It’s like Disney’s shopping/eating district. We knew we wanted to see the LEGO store…
and we watched the volcano at the Rain Forest Cafe erupt a few times. Great kid fun! Then Chris started feeling it. Weird stomach…the urge to stay withdrawn from crowds in the event that he may need to evacuate his lunch. Boy, there is nothing like looking into the crowds of smiling, Disney going faces all while knowing that someone in your immediate group is ready to blow like the Rain Forest Cafe volcano.
So within hours my poor husband was back at my in laws house, sleeping and puking. Yea! The bug had officially made it with us to The Sunshine State! This made me nervous. I spent the next day just waiting for it…for my own queasy twinges…or the announcement from one of our other kids.
Tuesday was looking up. Chris recovered quickly and we headed to the beach after lunch. The beach was a delight as you could imagine. Children are naturally stimulated by water and the beach in March is quite refreshing!
As Wednesday dawned I sensed that this bug had formed an “every other day” kinda pattern but wasn’t letting it get to me. We were headed to Gatorland!! Kids were up with the sun, riding bikes and enjoying the warmth. After Flynn and I returned from a truly pleasant morning bike ride to a local lake (sometimes I can’t believe how little one-on-one time I get to have with each of my kids. Flynn is so smart and sensitive and intuitive…my kinda guy)…he mentioned that his belly felt strange. I told him he should be ready for what was to come. He headed to the bathroom. I was closely monitoring what would potentially alter our touristy day plans while Chris and Micah headed off on a bike ride of their own while my in laws pulled out to run a quick errand. I assume that it was in that very moment that it took place…
Fast forward roughly a half hour…Flynn is still in the bathroom…my in laws are still running an errand…I have now put Max in a pack n play on the front porch and Chris has just returned from his ride with Micah. Iris is riding bike out front and the front door is wide open. Chris is telling me about his ride with Micah when a police officer approaches the porch.
“Hi folks. Do you have a five year old son, named Owen?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where he is?”
Chris and I immediately look around at the children on bikes…knowing Flynn is sick in the bathroom and Max is contained in the pack n play…there are only two…
“No. I guess we don’t.”(my heart has now stopped)
“Well, we have him. We found him about ten blocks from here. He said he was on a bike ride with his brother and he got lost.” More appropriately, he took off after Chris and Micah and never caught up to them and also never mentioned to anyone where or what he was up to. Parent of the year award…I know. If this were his first time taking matters into his own hands I might feel worse, but Owen doesn’t spook easily. There is no telling him about consequences for actions and him saying, “OH. I see, I should listen to you and stay close because it’s important for my survival and well being.” Nothing like that. I’d also love to tell you that this was Owen’s first run in with the police, but it is not. The officer took our ID’s and made sure we were in fact his parents and up rolled Owen, behind bars…in the back of a brand spankin new Florida State Police cruiser, wearing a “Jurior Officer Badge” and one giant grin. Thankfully he knew how to spell his last name and the officer looked up my in laws address. By then end of Owen’s return there were 3 police vehicles in the driveway and a lot of relief. We can’t even express how thankful we were that some caring man saw Owen riding, tears streaming down his face and pursued him. He finally stopped in an autobody parking lot and the man called the police. As we probed Owen he said he was riding after Micah and couldn’t find him. I asked, “Were you scared Owen?”
“Yea. I was sayin’ ‘PLEASE JESUS! DONT LET THIS HAPPEN!”
Ironically, once when I was about 6 years old, I was almost abducted from a neighbor’s pig roast by a man and his elderly mother who were driving a vehicle with a Florida license plate. My mother and a slew of other intoxicated people discovered what was happening as I was being loaded into the car by the “friendly man” and my mom literally beat the living shit out of him. (As in, she was strattling him and punching him in the head and smashing his face into the stone driveway…)
I have thanked God continuously that Owen’s brief adventure didn’t end any other way. I held my loud, rammy, opinionated tough guy a little tighter that night before bed.
Actually, no I didn’t. (Not just then at least) Because that night, I was busy puking. Nothing like poor Flynn. When he gets sick, he gets SERIOUSLY sick. He ended up having 9 separate bouts of the pukes. At one point when I needed to leave our bedroom to let Max cry to sleep, I went and laid in the other twin bed in Flynn’s room. He asked how I was.
“Not so good. I know I’m gonna throw up again. Just waiting for it. Waiting is the worst.”
“I know mom. When I was in the bathroom the last time, I was just saying ‘I’m ready. I’m ready.'”
This dear boy. He really handles it like a champ.
Once Max was done crying to sleep I went back to my bed to let some much needed sleep wash over me. After lying down, Iris came in the room and sat on my bed. She asked if she could pray for me. I said sure. Her prayer truly lifted my spirits, even if it was only to help me to remember that soon I too would be well enough to pray for someone. She also used that moment to confess to me that she had stolen some candy from a small bag that I had stashed as bribe material. I told her that was ok. I used to steal candy too. She went to sleep with a clean conscious.
I dozed and reawoke when Chris came to bed. He was feeling bothered by a rattle that the ceiling fan was making, so he turned it off and went to the car and got a fan that I had packed to satisfy my own fan addiction. I hadn’t needed it till now because the ceiling fan had been sufficient. When he plugged it in and I felt that very familiar, pleasant breeze and heard the hum of white noise I immediately thought of Flynn…one of the other fan addicts in the family. He had no air moving in his room. I knew this because I had laid in his room with him. Chris used the bathroom and brought me the fussing baby to nurse and attempted to climb into bed. At that moment, perhaps spurred by all the goodness from my own children in the last few hours…I stopped Chris and begged him to do one more thing before he got in bed.
“Would you take the fan and plug it in for Flynn and let it blow on him…?…He needs it more than I do.”
Chris agreed. And Flynn thanked me later. The pukes really do bring out the best in us it would seem.
We’ve been healthy for the last 48 hours and we got to visit Gatorland and float down the very beautiful Rock Springs. We even celebrated an early 1st birthday for Mister Maxster.
So much for fashion blogging. The truth is, life has a way of killing fashion. When your head is in a toilet and you’re wearing a dirty tee shirt and a skirt with a little vomit on it…fashion just needs to shoot a flare into the sky and hope for better days. I’m convinced that Chris and I will never be the kind of parents who are going to hand our 16 year olds the keys to their new car…We most likely won’t ever take our kids to the actual Disneyland…They probably won’t ever get a serving of Dip-n-dots that they won’t have to share with another sibling (cause Damn! Those little ice cream balls are EXPENSIVE!) But you know what they will have. A whole lot of character. 5 gallon, drywall buckets full of character. We will store all those buckets of character in the corner of the house that we keep saying we’re going to turn into another bathroom (and in depriving them of that second bathroom we are adding to the amount of character they will have, not that they wouldn’t gladly trade all the character for a second bathroom…but Chris and I are learning that with this many children, you can’t give options).
And so, tomorrow we depart. We are leaving behind our very benevolent in laws, one of whom was not feeling so well tonight before bed😔and a lot of germs that need to be lysolled away. The open road for the next two days is hopefully one of health and good fortune. But if not, that’s cool too. We’re ready for anything.
You know, I found your blog sometime last year. I’ve been following it with interest and delight, but it wasn’t until today that I finally realized why.
I grew up in a family of 7 where our mother stayed home and our father worked hard at his one-man construction/remodeling contractor business. We didn’t have the happiest childhood, frankly, but we did have our good times–and it is wonderful to see that there is a family out there (that I see as rather similar to my own in some ways) that is doing it right in so many other ways, too.
Thank you for sharing your joys as well as your struggles!
Thank you for reading Ashley. Somedays feel really rough, but writing about it helps me to process the positive when my nature is to fixate on the negative. The night my son and I were both throwing up I told him if we didn’t ever get sick we wouldn’t be very thankful to be healthy. I’m hoping my kids read these someday and remember the good times. Thanks for sharing a bit of your own story.
Great , as always!