just kidding! your saving throw of 20 means you only wish you had died of it!
positiverolemodel taught me a new word! “fulminant.” as in, “fulminant gastroenteritis.”
spring break started off really well. monday, we went to the irish music session at the library. the musicians on stage were people that i jam with on tuesday nights at the brewpub. they had heard stories of my 4-goat rodeo, but this was their first opportunity to witness it in all its camoflage-and-light-up-shoe glory. i’m sure i’ll hear all about how awesome my kids’ dancing (and running commentary!) was at the next jam session. then, everyone was still in such a good mood, that we hit a SECOND DESTINATION ON THE SAME DAY. (you will have no idea how significant this is until you attempt it yourself with 4 children with ages in the single digits.) it was freezing cold outside, so we left downtown and headed to the mall for pretzels, the playplace, and even a totally civilized stop into victoria’s secret for my free panties! that’s one nice thing about having a ticking time bomb with you… the overly friendly and helpful makeupbeast-saleswhores at victoria’s secret don’t even try to talk you into a $45 bra… they just hand you your little pink bag and get your asses out the door before somebody starts screeching and slinging poo.
i have no pictures of either of these stops, because there was no room to whip out my camera, because they were assholes-and-elbows crowded with little kids on spring break. do you see where this is going? yeah.
anyway, i did get a few shots during a quiet moment in the barnes and noble starbucks cafe. they had no rice krispie treats, which disappointed evilgremlin, until i convinced him that the godiva choclate bars at the checkout display were every bit as good as the hersheys chocolate bars he was accustomed to. also? it led to this totally awesome conversation:
EG: hey, this is good chocolate! what’s it called again? god-ifv-VAY?
me: godiva. it’s named after a lady who went riding on a horse naked once.
EG: oh. that makes sense. because GODIVA kind of rhymes with VAGINA!
luckily, he’s only about the third-loudest of our children, so we only got wide-eyed stares from old ladies within about 50 feet of our table.
(having finished the reese’s-peanut-butter-chocolate-chunk cookie larger than his head in less than two minutes, monkeybeef proceeded to amuse himself for the next ten by making fart noises.)
so tuesday we hit several specialty grocery stores in town, and it was a LOT of fun. see, our last hometown was about 30% black, and probably at least 10% each asian, indian, and mexican. so at any of the major grocery stores, you could buy collard greens, self-rising cornmeal mix, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, miso, nori, tahini, 8 different kinds of dried peppers, fresh cilantro, and chorizo… all things that don’t seem to exist in this whitebread town. so we hit the local food co-op, which not only had just about everything on my “cracka, please” shopping list, but also had miniature shopping carts for kids. now, i’m sure this looks like a GREAT idea for all those hip 38-year-old granola-greenies with a single organically-fed grade school kid. the owners may have rethought the concept after we spent the next 45 minutes cramming each tiny aisle, one right after the other, with our adhd-circus-train-wreck of 4 carts. evilgremlin picked out some cheese and soda, dramaqueen picked out some cheese and sweet potato chips, spazmonkey picked out some cheese and vegetable puffs called “pirate booty,” and monkeybeef, just to be original, reached around behind himself whenever i wasn’t looking and threw my purchases out of my cart. then it was on to the asian foodstore, where the kids went nuts in the awesome candy aisle and i stocked up on noodles and dried mushrooms. again, no pictures, because it was too crowded everywhere we went.
wednesday: this was the one day where the planets were going to align, and the high temperature would top out around fifty degrees instead of around thirty degrees like it had/would for the rest of the week. we had surfed the web the night before to look at pictures and descriptions of the 30+ parks in town, and let the kids pick out the park they wanted to go to (and, bonus, found two parks in town where fishing is legal, one on the river and one in a pond.) i really wish i had a picture of the 4-boy pile crowded around daddy and the laptop on our bed, but my job was to sit at the edge of the bed and catch whichever kid was currently at the losing end of the stay-on-the-mattress contest. so anyway, we spent the still-chilly morning going to the regular grocery store to get eggs for cupcakes and to pick out a frozen pizza for lunch. those car carts that look so big with just one fat little baby in them? they look more like clown cars with 4 boys hanging various body parts out of every opening. but at least the aisles are really wide! we got home, made cupcakes, and popped the pizza in the oven. dramaqueen broke his share of eggs, did some stirring and cupcake-paper-filling, and decorated his share of cupcakes… and then didn’t eat any. and then turned his nose up at the pizza. and then took a nap. a three-hour nap.
you’d think, after 8 years and change, i’d understand where this was headed. but no, i’m thinking he’s being a turd about food, and maybe stayed up too late partying with the stash of legos he keeps under his bedpillow. so it wasn’t until we got back from the park and dramaqueen started puking that i realized, DUH: my kid + quiet + not eating + impromptu napping = SICK AS HELL. somebody print that to poster size and put it up in my kitchen for me, right next to the “employees must wash hands” and “respect the meat” signs.
so, here are a couple of shots of the last happy moments of spring break:
so, every six hours or so thereafter, another one of us fell victim to the fulminant gastroenteritis (for those of you without medical degrees who might be wondering, the definition of “fulminant” is “bent over by satan’s six-dicked walrus” – prm swears you’ll find that in any reasonable medical dictionary) that patient zero dramaqueen picked up at one of the pediatric bioweapons conventions we had attended on monday. evilgremlin was next. then me. i swore it hadn’t hit me as hard as it had our two pukers, even as i lay in bed that night wanting to stab PRM every time he jiggled the mattress by typing on the laptop. not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before i was worshipping the porcelain god, which was at least an improvement over the boys jackson-pollocking various carpets in the house. as i fell asleep, PRM was still feeling pretty decent.
i was awakened around 3 AM by a very unique noise. leave it to my husband: no matter what he does, he does it in a manly way. imagine, if you will, henry rollins in a meth-and-coke fueled rage, straining his gargantuan neck while screaming in an earsplitting baritone at his toilet: “yark! yar-HORK! HOOOOOOOOOORK! HORK MOTHERFUCKER HOOOOOOOORK!” plus some splashing.
so. the next three days in the loser house of pestilence and abject misery were totally awesome. pants were pooped in by various loser males. i won’t name names. i’m not sayin’ … i’m just sayin’. anyway. it was all tv, pillows, blankets, gameboys, cartoons on dvd, moaning, puking, wet wipes, resolve, pepto-bismol, saltines, gatorade, spiderman pull-ups for a certain 40-pounder with a colon surgically altered to work like greased lightning (and just so you know, pull-ups? a HUGE hit with a boy who’s been potty trained for almost two years… oh yeah; that’s sarcasm), and bowls at every corner of every room (i think these caught maybe 7.3% of all puking events)… and that got us through the weekend here in satan’s funhouse. it’s sunday now, the puking has just about stopped, spazmonkey is about ready to turn in his spiderman pullups for regular underwear again, the carpets have been steam-cleaned, the porcelain scrubbed and the tile mopped, and if it’s made out of cloth in this house, it’s been either washed in hot water and bleach or thrown away.
happy motherfucking easter, bitches! also? it’s snowing today! yay, jesus!
