Wishes Do Come ... Ew.

So if you've "Liked" Fighting off Frumpy on Facebook (and if you haven't, click here!), you probably remember this status update from the other day:

Ha. Ha. Hahahahaha. I should be more careful what I wish for.

Remember my last post?

Well. I learned that it doesn't matter how hard you hope and pray and sanitize and scrub and hold your breath and walk around with your t-shirt over your nose: if your four children come down with a nasty, barfy, poopy stomach virus at the same time, and you are in charge of cleanup, you're gonna get it too.

And get it, I did. It was like everybody's collective sickness balled up into one big heinous super-germ and was all, "Let's attack Rita! It'll be fun! Yaaaay!"

The boys were pretty much over it by then, thank goodness, but that wasn't exactly a blessing. Because although they were home from school, they were still feeling well enough to want to run amok wreak havoc play. And y'all? My husband was already at work by the time I started throwing up, so I was on my own with four kids for most of the day. Now, I like to consider myself a fairly vigilant mother, but there's really only so much you can do in the way of discipline when you're posted up on the toilet holding a bucket in front of your face.

Yeah. It was like that.

Brutal.

Luckily, the baby was cool with chilling with me all day in the bed (and crawling around on the floor while I was making my various contributions to the porcelain throne). But as you can imagine, when a seven-year-old, a five-year-old and a three-year-old have the run of the house ... it gets ugly. Like, nothing but (an entire brand-new box of) popsicles and dry cereal (spilled all over the place) all day long ugly. And Legos and paper and various other crap all over the place ugly. And unflushed toilet and fridge left hanging open ugly. I swear, minus parental nagging, they take the opportunity to do pretty much everything I always tell them not to do.

So with trembling thumbs, between bouts of vomit, I texted my husband, "Please come home. I need you." To which he grandly replied that he was coming home early.

Now technically what I meant by that was, "Come home like right this minute because OMG I am so freaking sick and I can't control these kids from the toilet or the bed and I need you to just take the day off and come home and take care of things while I can't. Booohooohoooooooo."

But Curtis apparently interpreted my text as, "Come home like only an hour early because even though I'm sick I'm handling things just wonderfully and I will be perfectly fine between 6:30am and 3:30pm. Tra la la!"

So despite leaving work early (he and I have very different definitions of "early"), he was gone for most of the day. By the time he got home, the house was trashed. On top of that, I hadn't done any of my usual daily chores. The dishes in the dishwasher were clean, so the dirty dishes were piling up in the sink. The cats' litter box was overflowing. The dogs' food and water bowls were empty. The laundry was in a mound beside the washing machine.

And you know what?

It was still like that yesterday morning when I finally could get out of bed.

Plus a few bowls and a pan from where Curtis had made a nutritious dinner of ramen noodles for himself and the kids.

"But hey, they're still alive, and nobody got hurt," he said cheerfully when I pointed this out.

So it's true: moms don't get sick days. Because even when they are forced to have a sick day - like, tethered to the toilet - they are faced with double, even triple, even quadruple the workload when they get well. I had to take care of the things that didn't get done while I was sick, plus the mess(es) the boys had made, plus disinfect every surface in the house. I got serious, y'all: I used two entire tubs of Clorox wipes on every switch, knob, button, and handle, doused the rest of the joint with bleach water and Lysol, and washed every soft thing I could get my hands on in scalding hot water.

Curtis is lucky he didn't get it. For one, because it was a horrible and excruciating virus - but also because he is a huge baby when he is sick and I probably would have killed him.

I, on the other hand, don't know whether I'm lucky or not. Because, sure, my wish came true ... but couldn't it have been a better wish, like the anonymous donation of funding for a boob job world peace?





PS - I've got a giveaway up! Check out the Giveaways & Reviews page! :)