Category 5 Hurricane of Pain

In my last post, I hinted that I might have gotten food poisoning from an ancient bottle of Smirnoff Twisted. Now I don't believe that it was food poisoning, but a stomach bug.

How do I know this? Benevolent Dictator spent the hours of 2:30 a.m.-6 a.m. puking, crying and being miserable while Jeff and I spent those hours heaving her over her diaper pail/trash can so she could throw up, changing bedsheets, cleaning the floor and cleaning each other from when we'd get hit with vomit.

Between 6-7:30, BD and I slept together in her glider. It was the only way to ensure that some of us got a bit of sleep.

It's the first time I've ever seen her vomit. And it sucks. It's rather heartbreaking to see her face ringed with dark circles from lack of sleep and how tiny and frail she can look when she's not feeling well. Her cheeks are bright red -- probably from irritation and the screaming trauma of puking for the first time in her life.

Today I figured that we'd be sacked out on the couch, indulging in a big no-no as we watched a bunch of TV shows and I made sure she stayed hydrated thanks to my milk. Which didn't sound bad given that Jeff and I got maybe four hours of sleep last night.

No dice. She's as chipper as she ever was. Albeit a little crankier and demanding, but she's still crawling, talking, exploring and doing everything she did before. Even tried Pedialyte and immediately rejected it ("WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT? I'M NOT DRINKING THAT!"). Meanwhile, I'm learning that I can survive on fragmented sleep about as well as I did when she was three months old.

The funny thing is that I feel like I just tempted the gods, fate or The Lady last night when I said that BD went down for bed without fuss and her snotty nose seemed to dry up.Now that I look back on it, it was the eye of the hurricane of sickness and teething that's been rolling through here. If there's anything I've learned right now is that children are chaos -- just when you think everything is fine, something insane happens that leaves you staring at the wreckage going, "What the fuck just happened?"