2010: Vomit Reigns Supreme!, Good Morning (Extreme)! Diarrhea, and Big Head’s Staycation Part II

I have a the best life, blessed (I don't use the word blessed, ever, but it is the correct use in this situation) with three beautiful, fun-loving boys and a surprisingly loving wife (I'm a bone head and unappreciative on occasion), but, honestly, 2010 has not been our year. Turns out our boys harbor bacteria and viral infections on par with a wooden chopping board in a poultry processing plant. This year, Beckett, a.k.a. Big Head, has been in the hospital twice for repository difficulties and that's just the start of it. Since our Good Stuff report from Jackson Hole, Rhys passed his stomach flu along to Master Kelly and his mama. This week's extra special ailment: strep throat for Rhys & Kelly.

The stomach flu started with intermittent vomiting - a manageable 24 hour thing. The best part of the flu we didn't expect and learned to love, morning, noon and night: diarrhea, lingering for weeks. Good morning Diarrhea, how are you this fine day! Lately, each wonderful, joyous morning, we unzip Rhys' cute footie doggie jamma to find a rhea ramma in his pants with all the stomach flopping stench of a miniature hog farming operation. A oh, holly, hhaal, that is fufufufufu...hhoo, wrong. Slick, sick, stinking, up-the-back, down the leg, chunky curry, eight wipe, wrong.

Kelly is a poop liar, meaning he denies the existence of poop, as if trained by MI5 in the art of deception, concealed in his blessed #6 Huggie. One morning Kelly wandered, sleepy eyed out of room as I was totting Big Boy downstairs for breakfast. Kelly shuffled down the stairs a few steps behind me, but the stench of fresh poo preceded him. I asked Kelly if he had a poop and from top step to landing he did a Mark McGwire and denied, denied, denied, "No poop daddy." Despite his protests, I gathered supplies to do a diap change and then to unzipped his footed pj's down just below his belly button and quickly re-zipped the spastic colon horror show going on in there. Kelly's entire abdomen below his nipple line was covered in camel colored, lose stool. The situation was beyond my capabilities, especially with Rhys crying for his orange juice and hollowing for waffles, so I called for the hazmat squad, Catherine, for a full decontamination and hose down. Catherine is an angle from the 10th level of heaven.