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wrong week to quit sniffing glue
Himself is on a business trip for the first time since February 2020. Naturally he was nervous about this, partly because the last three or four trips he took before the plague were unpleasant experiences for reasons relating to why he's not at either of those jobs anymore, and partly because, well, plague. So here's how our past few days have gone:
Sunday, we buried his aunt, who had died the previous Thursday morning after a final decline that took several months and left his mother pretty much used up. (Not that she wanted her sister to die, but caregiver burnout is real, and she was an extremely difficult patient.) I hosted the Zoom for the family members who couldn't attend in person.
Monday, he took the prince to school as normal and then faffed about while I had a workday, which I interrupted to drive him to the metro so he could take the train to the airport rather than driving. As soon as we got in the car it started to rain—just a bit, but enough that he was glad not to be on foot. Then there were delays on the metro, including a whole line simply not running, but that was all right, because his flight was also delayed. I picked up the prince after school, and the in-laws came over at dinnertime as they'd planned but only stayed for a few minutes rather than camp out to babysit, because I'd decided I couldn't possibly go to rehearsal that night; one absence wouldn't hurt anybody.
I'd spent some of the day transcribing the audio from the recording of the Zoom funeral in the hope of adding subtitles to the video for people who might not be able to hear it so well because it was recorded outdoors, they're old and their hearing isn't so good, they don't actually understand Hebrew nor have the background to know what the Hebrew bits of the service are about even if they don't speak the language themselves (🙋🏻♀️), or whatever. I found the text of Tziduk Hadin online and was able to identify which bits the rabbi said and didn't say (and didn't care why he included this or excluded that; that wasn't the point), and I already knew the Mourner's Kaddish (and they always hand out copies of that text anyway, but finding something I could copy and paste was easy and I didn't need to worry about whether I did or didn't recognize the words), but when I looked for an online text from which I could copy and paste El Malei Rachamim, I found I could follow the beginning and ending but there were several lines in the middle where I couldn't tell exactly what the rabbi was saying but I was confident it wasn't what I was reading. I pinged a couple of rabbi friends, one of whom responded extremely helpfully before it even occurred to me to ask my mother-in-law for the officiating rabbi's contact information so I could ask him for his text directly. My friend supplied text I could copy and paste and the officiant sent me a jpg of the notes he'd been reading from, and I matched them up and the transcript is good and now I just have to fight with the computer to get the captions to attach to the video. I alerted the other rabbi friend that the issue was solved so the initial message could safely be disregarded completely.
Tuesday, I took the prince to school early to drop in at the morning edition of the extended-day program he already always goes to in the afternoons, came home, had a whole workday, answered the phone like a chump when my mom called exactly at quitting time, and went to pick up the kid. There are always some people being jerks on the road at the evening rush hour, but this was a particularly unanimously obnoxious experience, and at a red light I even posted to Discord about it:
AgentReynard (Fox) (she/her)
must everyone operating a motor vehicle in my community this afternoon be an utter ass?
I should have stayed quiet.
What happened next was we got home; I put the kid's bookbag and jacket (which had been in the bookbag) and lunchbag in the laundry because they were rank from watermelon juice having spilled out of one of his tupperwares; we had dinner, including sharing a slice of walnut povitica my father-in-law had brought over on Sunday; I took out the trash and the recycling, as Tuesday is Garbage Eve in our neighborhood; and meanwhile I excused the kid from the table when he asked, and he went to play games on the iPad, as is his habit. The second rabbi friend replied to the all-clear, saying "Oops, missed the initial message completely, glad it's sorted, how are you doing?" and I said "Oh, you know, handling the camera at a funeral that was a long time coming, followed by several days of solo parenting a kindergartener in a plague while managing long-distance tech support for my brain-injured widowed mother. Basically living the dream." Sandwich generation, after all.
I should. have stayed. quiet.
A few minutes later, the prince said "Mommy? I don't feel good. I think I need to sit with you." He didn't have a fever, but of course if he's going to throw up, I don't want him sitting with me, and I encouraged him to go stand over the toilet if he needed to; he did so for a couple of minutes and then said he felt better and didn't need to throw up after all. Back to the couch to watch videos while sitting in my lap. In an abundance of caution, I did a rapid covid test on him, which was negative, thank goodness. Only then he felt icky again. I got a bowl for him to keep handy, and he kind of gagged and spit in it a few times—the way I do when I'm nauseated, frankly, because something is wrong with my gag reflex and I haven't actually vomited since about 1992—but when we ultimately turned off the TV at bedtime, he got six steps away and then turned back and picked up the bowl and hurled fairly convincingly into it. And promptly announced he felt much better.
So okay. I praised him lavishly for getting to the receptacle in time. I cleaned it up, gave him a wet towel to wipe his face, encouraged him to rinse his mouth. He was generally his usual self at bedtime, if a little quieter. I emailed his pediatrician to ask if this could be a previously unnoticed sensitivity to walnuts, which he may never have eaten before? Because that's about the only thing that made sense of this happening so quickly. He'd also been having a bit of a sniffle but at this point was like totally stuffed up in his head, so I helped him blow his nose and dosed him with Benadryl (for the nausea as well as the breathing), coated his chest and feet with VapoRub, turned on his humidifier, and put an extra pillow in his bed to prop him up a little bit. With the antihistamine in him he went right to sleep, of course. I apparently did not succeed in washing the VapoRub entirely off my hands before the next time I rubbed my eyes, so that sucked, but I thought great, one complaint about traffic and this is what happens to my evening, it is wine o'clock, dudes.
Luckily I didn't bother actually drinking any wine, because a couple hours later I checked on the kid before I went to bed myself, and oh my god, you guys, I could smell the puke from his bedroom door. He was covered in it, as were all the pillows, the sheets, the top edge of his duvet, and his favorite cuddly planet (the others were further away in the bed and were spared). He kind of opened one eye and looked at me, then tried to turn over and go back to sleep, and I had to wake him up to say wow, no, buddy, we've got to get you cleaned up. He sat up and let me take the pillows and the toy and the duvet before he was alert enough to realize he was filthy. Over the next, what, 15 or 20 minutes, I got the bed stripped (including the "waterproof" mattress cover, which to be fair had only had one small breach) and the boy undressed; everything in the laundry that could go in the laundry; the boy cleaned up; the mattress on the floor (he has a "low loft" bed that I wasn't going to put the mattress back up on knowing I was going to have to take it down again once the zip-up mattress cover was clean) and made up with a spare pillow, last week's linens out of his laundry hamper, and a fleece blanket; and a plastic trash can right next to his face as he went back to sleep. Sponged the pillows with vinegar, then put them in the bathtub and scrubbed baking soda into them as best I could.
I was deliriously tired at this point. I also still hadn't got all the VapoRub off my goddamn fingers, so I just took my contacts out and put my glasses on, because jesus. Texted Himself on the other coast to let him know all this was happening. Emailed the kid's school to let them know he'd be absent on Wednesday. When it was just the bedtime all-better-now event I was waffling on sending him in, but throwing up in the middle of the night (and not even waking for it!)—I would not thank another family for sending their kid to school in similar circumstances. Texted my own team to let them know I'd be taking a sick day. Waited for the laundry to finish (two extra rinse cycles) so I could put everything in the dryer that could go in the dryer. Because I had not scraped up any of the solids before putting stuff in the wash, I had to shake a certain amount of (now very clean and spun-dry) pilled vomit off some of the items into the trash before putting them in the dryer. So then I had to get the broom and dustpan to clean up the bits of same that had scattered on the floor instead. And then I could wash my own face and brush my teeth and go to bed.
I normally sleep with plugs in my ears, even when my snoring spouse is not present, because I'm so accustomed to the sensory deprivation that it's hard to get to sleep without it. But of course I didn't want to risk not hearing if the kid needed me, so last night I didn't use them. Meaning I slept very poorly indeed. I heard the dryer cycle end at about 1:00; I woke up suddenly at 1:40, got up to pee, and checked on the kid again—sleeping peacefully and puke-free, even breathing more quietly than he had been. Woke up again around 3:30, again around 4:30, again around 5:30. This is for the birds. My nighttime bite guard is keeping my teeth safe, I suppose, but doing nothing to stop me clenching my jaw. My shoulder hurts. My head hurts. I wonder if my blood pressure is as high as I suspect. I try to lie still and concentrate on relaxing the muscles in my neck.
Wednesday, because I have no foam plugs in my ears, I hear the kid's bedroom door open at something like 6:00 and then he comes into my room and he is fully dressed in daytime clothes. He says he feels entirely all better; his tummy doesn't hurt and neither do his head or arms or legs, all of which did hurt when he needed to throw up, which he hadn't mentioned at the time. He tests negative for covid again, so assuming he continues to be fine all day, he can go to school on Thursday—he'll pass 24 hours vomit-free by 10pm tonight (another reason I'm glad I checked on him before I went to bed; I mean of course if I'd gone straight to bed and then he'd woken up covered with vomit in the morning I'd have felt immeasurably guilty, but just from a logistics standpoint, I know when the last time he vomited was to a much more precise degree than if I'd had to hand-wave it as some time Tuesday night or Wednesday morning) and I feel fine about that given that he hasn't had a fever at any point.
Leading candidates are, in no particular order: random virus, because it's his third week at a new school; food poisoning, either from the walnuts (I also ate some of that povitica, but I've had walnuts before in my life) or the watermelon(? if it was starting to go off? it definitely smelled terrible in his bag and I threw away the rest of the container); post-nasal drip that was bad enough to go down his throat and upset his stomach (which is what the kid himself thinks it is, meaning the best outcome may be that he finally stops eating boogers, insh'allah); actual nasal congestion that was so bad he couldn't breathe and he coughed himself sick. I have no symptoms myself—well, I have plenty of symptoms, but they're symptoms of stress and fatigue, not of whatever this was, so I'm leaning against the virus thing, because last time he got a stomach bug I got it myself and knew it for sure.
His bed is put entirely back together. I vacuumed the baking soda off the pillows and scrubbed more into their other sides, and several hours later I vacuumed those, and friends: WOW. There are a couple of stains I'm going to have to live with because the better stain removers are eye irritants and we're talking about a kid's bed pillows, but the smell is gone. The only pillow still being treated is the extra one I stuck under him for height, and it's a memory foam situation no one actually ever uses, so if it's a loss we won't really miss it. I also mended an envelope-style pillowcase when I noticed one of the inner seams was going. Meanwhile the kid has watched videos, played iPad, run around the house, pretended to nap, and weeded out a flowerbed. By the time Himself comes home late tomorrow night, the only way he'll know all of this happened is that I told him so.
I am unlikely to complain about traffic on the school run ever again.
no subject
Sympathy/awe
I'm stunned by all the bad things and amazed by your ability to cope.
Re: Sympathy/awe
Your "ability to cope" comment has reminded me of this conversation that I had more than 15 years ago. I appreciate your icon in the circumstances, as well. :-D