Any shameless excuse for Princess Bride…
In what will forever be known as Flumageddon 2012, the entire family was felled by one nasty bug.
First, my dad had it. Y’all remember my dad, right? The Man Who Says His Face Shall Not Be On This Blog.
So Exhibit 1:
(Enjoy my creepy artistic skills and your 1-in-4 chance of guessing which one is my Dad. He’s the one that will be chasing me with a golf club after seeing this picture. But technically I didn’t violate the FACE rule, right Dad? Right?)
Exhibit 2: So you already saw Monday:
Exhibit 3: Thanksgiving
Exhibit 4: Also Thanksgiving. Mommio & Itty Bit down for the count.
Exhibit 5: Not technically part of Flumageddon, but definitely added to the intensity of YUCK. Following our really sedate Thanksgiving meal, I received a random photo message from an unknown long-distance number.
Seriously, has any stranger ever sent you one of these?
I was somewhat relieved to see the caption, “The King of Elbutts”, but still had no idea who had sent it. Mystery solved when the photo was Facebooked to me from some out-of-state relatives who have a gnarly sense of humor and remembered the elbutt saga. I’m warning you not to click and biggify that image… (as GunDiva would say)
Exhibit 6: Black Friday
(at least I didn’t haul him out shopping anyway and let him helpfully throw up into his hands like he did last year in Macy’s)
Exhibit 7: Heck no, I’m not showing you a picture of me. Just imagine that Sunday I got run over by a Mack truck. Or three. And then they backed their bad selves up over me.
Exhibit 8: Kiddo sent home from school today.
Exhibit 9: My sis’ entire family knocked flat:
(Sorry Ju, most recent pic I have of all of you includes my photobombing rockstar)
Exhibit 10: Again, not technically part of Flumageddon, but a noteworthy mess: Beautiful Dummy Boy otherwise known as Joey got out at 1am. No pictures of the incident, because it included hollering by both man and beast. Thankfully they both had the same goal in mind. My girl is worth her fence-respecting weight in gold.
Exhibit 11: Dad-in-law is now coming down with the yuck :(
Exhibit 12: Aaaand Mr. Daddy just walked back in the door and is now sound asleep at 2pm.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around the numbers, but Mr. Daddy has dropped 20 pounds in the past three weeks of being sick, he’s worked a total of one shift in 20 days, and I’ve worked one in 14.
Family Thanksgiving dinner was cancelled.
Black Friday shopping was cancelled.
Breathing through my nose was cancelled.
Exactly how long are you supposed to survive on Dayquil/Nyquil/Sudafed until you start seeing those fine print side effects? twitch twitch
On Tuesday, I drug myself to the kitchen and made chicken soup. Which made me cry. Because Mom used to bring me chicken soup when I was sick. And I asked her one day to teach me to make it. And she got the funniest smile on her face, then leaned forward conspiratorially and stage whispered, “I get it in a bag… I just add vegetables to it”.
And as I stirred the soup mix out of the bag into the pot, I couldn’t stop the tears. Part of me felt a bit angry still at being robbed of her so soon. And another part was just so grateful. She’d given me more than a secret recipe shortcut that day. She gave me permission not to be SuperMom. The woman who ironed her towels and put bleach in her car soap… was still comforting me with her chicken soup secret.
After I walked a bowl of the soup out to Mr. Daddy and told him how much I missed his mom, my phone buzzed. My own mother – sick herself – painstakingly texted an entire prayer for our healing. There is never a day that goes by that I don’t know that I’m covered in her prayers. And because I can’t hear her, she types them out key by key. I kind of hit the jackpot in every kind of parentage.
So I’m sitting here. Sick. and Grateful.
And still looking for the funny.
double eyebrows
Yep. That does it for me.
Every time.
What’s your happiness today?
.