I take back any complaint I may have made–tacit or implicit–about my children’s behavior yesterday. They are angels.

Shortly after I finished writing yesterday afternoon, it started.

“Mama, my tummy hurts.”
“My tummy hurts, too, Mama.”
“I haveta go to the bathroom….”

Those four hours til bedtime? Never longer. But knowing what I then knew? Their behavior earlier in the day? Awesome.

Also? I would like to personally apologize to anyone who was in the Shaw’s Kid Stop or my local Post Office yesterday. Cuz… ummmm… I’m just really, really sorry. I didn’t know.

So we made it through… and by bedtime they seemed… uhhh… empty. Thank God. Monkey actually cried to go to bed, and went right to sleep (he’d had the worst of it, I think… having proclaimed at one point to me “Mama, did you know that your tummy is connected to your tushie??”). Chickadee was feeling a bit better and so had to play around for a while, but even she, eventually, dropped off to sleep.

All of which left me free to begin my own journey with this particular little virus starting about half an hour before I’d intended to go to bed. Yay! One would think–with my oldest now being six–that I would have figured out by now that no illness passes me by, no matter how obsessive-compulsively I wash my hands over and over. But this is part of the amnesia that keeps us moms nurturing our young instead of running, screaming, into the night. We conveniently forget that which is horrible. And so we do things like, say, tend to two children stricken with a tummy bug for four hours, put them to bed, and then have a sandwich. A bologna sandwich. Sometimes my stupidity amazes even me.

I had a great post planned for last night, too. But given the circumstances it seemed wiser to just hang out in the bathroom and wish for the sweet kiss of death. I may pen it, later, after I run out to the store and buy up all the Immodium, Emetrol, and Pepto they have the on the shelves.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go open all the windows and spray my entire house with Lysol.