Weekend Roundup

Our weekend was a little crazy.

Scotty was in North Carolina all of last week, and I did a pretty good job holding down the fort on my own for the first part of the week. By Thursday, I was going a little stir crazy and needed to get out of the house. My kids had a short day on Thursday and no school on Friday, so I ended up searching for a good deal on a hotel room for the night. I thought it would be fun to pick them up from school, head somewhere away from home, and take advantage of a hotel pool. I found a reasonable hotel in Logan (which is about an hour and a half from Salt Lake). We headed straight to Logan after school. We had the pool and hot tub to ourselves (which I love because that way I can yell at my kids all I want), and there was also Disney Channel and free breakfast, so my kids were on cloud nine.

At 6:00 on Friday morning, Eva suddenly started gagging and choking like she was throwing up, so I flew out of bed, turned the light on, and grabbed a garbage can. She heaved a few times, and then just spit a little. I don't know what was going on with her, but I was on guard for the rest of the morning - constantly checking her forehead for a fever and ready to grab the garbage can in an instant, as it is tradition for someone to throw up any time Scotty is out of town. I was very disappointed that the initial incident resulted in everyone waking up so early. They might have slept for another half hour.

We hit breakfast, went swimming again, and then packed up and left at 11:00. We headed to a nearby town to visit a friend for a little while before heading home. On the way home, Daisy needed to pee, so I stopped at a Smith's Marketplace. On the way out of the store, Daisy and Zoe tripped over each other and fell flat on their faces in the parking lot. They screamed with dedication equal to an Oscar winning actress, and I dragged their reluctant bodies to the van. At this point, my gas light turned on, so we stopped to get gas, and then everyone started whining for food (Nicky was near death), so we went to McDonald's. We had to be home by 2:00 because my nieces and nephew were coming to sleep over. We pulled in the driveway right at 2:00, and they were waiting for us on our porch. I left Eva in the van for a few minutes while I unloaded some stuff and let everyone in the house. When I went out to get her, she was covered in chocolate. After my brother-in-law left, I went to unload more stuff from the van, and I discovered that it wasn't just chocolate... it was m&m throw up. Eva had puked while I was letting the kids in the house.

I spent the next hour trying to bathe Eva and get everything unpacked from our trip while the other kids ran around the house destroying everything in their paths. As all of this was going on, my neighbor dropped off 30 pounds of raw chicken that she had ordered for me, so I was also trying to repackage the meat and get it in the freezer. Then the ward mission leader called and asked if I could feed the missionaries, and at that point, I just busted out in hysterical laughter.

(I politely declined).

It was pure chaos. Eva cried... and cried... and cried. I kept checking her forehead. She felt a little bit warm, but after an hour, she was acting pretty normal and didn't seem to be running a fever at all. Still, there was no way I was getting the throw up cleaned out of the car seat until at least Monday.

Then, just to make things more interesting, my three-year-old niece was complaining that her tummy hurt. About every fifteen minutes, she would moan about her stomach and say that she wanted her mom and dad. This continued until she fell asleep at 8:00.

I wasn't sure what the night would bring, but I was pretty confident that someone was gonna barf.

I was wrong.

Instead, my niece had explosive diarrhea in her pull-up, and I woke up at 6:00 to everyone freaking out about the smell. I went downstairs, and the scent hit me like a brick (when Scotty got home at 2:00 that afternoon, he could smell it still). It was atrocious! It was all up her back, and since she had slept in it for a while, it had dried to her. I cleaned her up the best I could and then put her in the bath. It was the type of bath that needed to be drained twice. She had clearly passed a demon through her colon.

I bagged up the poo clothes and put the blankets in the wash. I fed everyone and got them dressed. Their dad came at 10:00 to get them and then I spent the next hour cleaning up smashed goldfish crackers and play-doh.

(Since I've already maxed out on poop conversation in this post, I'm not going to tell you about how Eva pooped all over the new living room rug later that day. I also won't tell you that it was a lot).

It was mid-day that I experienced the great singalong catastrophe of 2018. I needed something to keep us busy while we waited for Scotty to get home from North Carolina, and the non-singalong was the answer.

I was so upset about the singalong, and I kept debating whether I should try again. I'd seen the movie four times, and I thought it might be time to stop, but I ended up talking with some friends at a birthday party that evening, and we decided to go for it! So the happy ending to the singalong catastrophe is that I went to the real singalong. There were words on the screen, people REALLY sang, and I got as close as I have ever been to singing a duet thanks to the gentleman I was sitting next to (the dude could hold a tune, so I decided we were going for it - me & this stranger. He sang Zac Efron's notes, and I sang Zendaya's, and we rewrote the stars)

(We high-fived after).

I made the decision late Saturday night that I was going to stop seeing The Greatest Showman, mostly for the sake of our budget. But on Monday, I decided that if someone invited me to go to the singalong again, I was going!

No one invited me.

Jerks.

I spent Sunday and Monday in recovery from the events of the weekend, and in all honesty, my recovery will continue through most of this week. I am always really ornery the week after Scotty is out of town. I do okay while he's away, but when he gets back, I'm a beast.