It Was Just Another Monday…Untill…

…about 7:00 PM.

Yes, yesterday started out to be a very typical Monday.  Got some groceries…did lots of laundry…performed a surgical procedure on a paper elephant…

His tail needed to be re-attached.  Nothing that a little packaging tape wouldn’t fix.  (I’ve learned to never be without packaging tape…with it many crisis can be averted.) 

…Spent a good part of the afternoon scrubbing out this darling basinet that a friend found for me in “big garbage.”  Isn’t it cute? 

…Had a yummy supper cooked on our grill…

    Then, shortly after 7:00 PM things started to head downhill.  My oldest and youngest sons both sustained injuries from our coffee table within five minutes of each other.  Elijah’s wasn’t quite as serious - it just resulted in a big bruise on his forearm - but Noah got a pretty massive cut on his ear.  I don’t know who shed more tears…he or I! 

And  finally, (and I warn you, this is not for my squeemish readers) just as the day was winding down, while Noah and I were looking at his last book of the night, he emptied the entire contents of his stomach on me.  And, wow, I cannot believe a two-year-old stomach could actually contain that much!   Eesh!  The joys of parenting!  (You’re probably wondering the same thing we did…if the “head-on” collision with the coffee table and the vomiting were related.  We didn’t think so, since Noah had had some diarrea and fussiness earlier in the day.)

It is truly awful when such little people get sick stomaches, is it not?  There Noah was, looking at me with his big blue eyes, as if to say, “What is happening?  And why aren’t you doing anything to help me?  Make this stop!”   He continued to vomit (well, dry-heave actually, which always seems even more pathetic) throughout the night, and I was really starting to get worried towards the morning, when he couldn’t seem to keep any type of liquid down.   But he turned the corner, started to keep little bits of juice and water down, and ate a piece of dry toast later in the morning.  Phewf! 

I just recently read a good quote about motherhood (and this is probably a paraphrase)… ”Becoming a mother is like having part of your heart walking around outside of your body for the rest of your life.”  It struck me as so poignant and true.  I’ll never forget the overwhelming feelings that came shortly after Eliajh was born.  Feelings of such sorrow that I could not protect him from everything.  As Noah’s Mom, I would have taken his sickness upon myself in a heartbeat.  Everytime he cried in the confusion of vomiting, I cried too, from heartache. 

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with all this.  It’s probably just sounding like rambling…but remember, I have a good excuse…I didn’t really get any sleep last night.