Oh Woe is Us. (AKA, The Troubling Tale of the Baby in the Van)

My lapses in timely posts are almost always due to two things: illness and or pure lethargy. Since I have returned to work (and my children back to the germpool otherwise known as daycare) we have had far too much of the former. Really, it seems like every time I turn around someone is coughing and feverish or...something.

But this time was a doozy.

I'll be brief because I'm not quite self-centred enough to think that people want to read a minute by minute account of the week of vomit, but it started innocently enough with Kaya throwning up all over the kitchen floor mere seconds before we left for daycare last Friday. By the time Eric and I had pulled into his parking lot at work an hour later, the babysitter had called to say Kaya had barfed twice more and that was their limit, so I turned around and went home.

Downhill from there, to say the least. The baby seemed a bit better on Saturday...we had a fair amount of socializing on the weekend...family members from out of town, a BBQ at our house with friends and their three kids, yada, yada, yada. A few days later and all innocence is lost. People around us have dropped like flies from this little stomach bug, so please accept this as a blanket apology to all who know us and who may be cursing our very name.

I started to feel violently ill during our BBQ - the friends we had invited over were people I did not know well so I didn't really feel like telling them that the reason I was leaving for the bathroom every 10 minutes was NOT due to my raging coke habit like they surely must have presumed. (Although I was pretty good at using the baby as a shield...she needs a jacket! A diaper! A bottle!)

The night ended, well...it never really did end. But as I was lying on our bathroom floor in the wee hours of Monday morning, wondering if there was any point in dragging myself back to bed (there wasn't) these are the things, in no particular order, that I was thinking:

"Please don't let this violent retching wake-up the baby." Naturally, this was followed immediately by a plaintive and increasingly insistent "WaaaaaaaAAAA" from her bedroom.

"Oh! I'm so glad that we had company tonight! Aside from the fact that I was practically barfing into their laps, this bathroom is really freaking clean." This thought is a pleasant change from any other time that I can remember sleeping on bathroom floors (usually in my university years) in which the thoughts were more along the lines of...is that black thing on the floor over there alive?

"Hmmmm....that particular shade of vomit is the EXACT colour I had hoped Eric would paint the bedroom last summer." Which, for those of you who might be interested. is a greyish blue colour that emerges from the innards somewhere after bile, but before dry heaves.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg, but as I'm sure most of us can attest, when doubled over with a hideous virus most rational thought is well...absent.

To make matters worse, much worse, a few short hours later Eric had taken up residence in the bathroom and I had moved back to the bed.

In fact, rational thought was absent for the next 36 hours at least. On Tuesday, I thought that since I was feeling marginally better I should go back to work.

A rather large mistake actually.

I was packing the kids up for babysitter, Eric was still sick, and I went out to the van with Kaya, the daycare bag, my purse, etc. As I was wrestling with everything and getting Kaya in the car seat, I put everything on the floor of the van. Kieran was yelling something at me from the steps of the house and so I was talking to him, finished buckling in Kaya and slammed the door shut.

In the second that I did that, I realized that the car keys - I had grabbed Eric's from the table beside the door to save myself from digging mine out from the bottom of my purse - were on the floor of the van. And the van doors had inexplicably locked. And my purse , with MY KEYS was also now locked inside the van as well. Along with the baby.

I did what any other rational person would do. Or at least, I mean anyone who hadn't eaten, drank or slept for almost 48 hours. Someone who was still nauseous, headachey and in no condition to be driving, going to work or looking after children and who has just realized that they have locked their one-year-old in the car with no way to get her out. I totally lost it.

I was bawling and freaking out. Kaya, who seemed to of course immediately realize her peril, was also screaming inside the van. Kieran was just totally freaked out at what was going on and kept telling me that my keys were in my pocket (they weren't).

Anyway, Eric called CAA. Thankfully, they do consider a baby locked in a car to be an "emergency" and said they would have someone there in 15 minutes. I continued to freak out for the next 10 minutes, trying to knock on the van window and get poor Kaya to stop wailing. Anyway, the next thing I know, Eric walks out of the house with my car keys. I have never been so happy. They were, strangely enough on the fireplace mantel and I have zero recollection of putting them there or why they would be there, but at least they were.

Crisis past. Baby was rescued. No need to call the authorities on the poor parenting (in this instance at least...)

We're all better now but, let me go find some wood to knock on.