The Sickness Sweep

I will preface this by saying it's been a rough week here on the homefront and for good reason, there will be no pictures to illustrate the sickie drama we've been experiencing! Plus, we figure you have a pretty vivid imagination. However, we felt the need to document the first big sickness that hit our house, even though the details are a bit gross, so consider yourself warned.

It all started when Eric and I went up to bed after relaxing downstairs. We went up and on the way into our bedroom, we both noticed a particular smell. Eric commented first questioning the smell and I promptly replied that it smelled like vomit. We went into the trio's room where the odor was getting stronger, and sure enough, there was Krista barfing all over her crib sheet and herself! Poor thing! We took her out and immediately put her in the tub where she continued to vomit. Once she was finished, or at least we thought, we stripped her down to her birthday suit and ran a warm bath. She wasn't sure what was going on but seemed to enjoy getting a bath at midnight. While I was on bathing duty, Eric was in the bedroom trying to clean up the crib. Once he got her bedding swapped out, I got her all fresh and clean in a new set of jammies. She smelled sweet and was basking in all of the attention she was getting so I brought her into the bed with me to lay down and rest in the dark.

Well, by this point, she was bright eyed and bushy tailed, obviously not ready to settle down so she kept trying to get up from the bed. After us debating for a minute on whether or not we should take her to her crib, she promptly threw up again, all over Mom, Dad and their sheets! As we were cleaning up yet another round of throw up, I peeked in on the other two to discover that Jamison had joined in on the fun, although most of his puke was already all over the crib and the carpet since he apparently stood in the corner and hurled over and over.

We put both pukers back in the tub, having a deja vu moment, except this time it was two babies instead of one. Eric went back to cleaning up and at this point, Kiera was up and wondering what on earth was going on in her room. We got the sickies washed, dried, and in clean pajamas with clean sheets on the bed, although we put down towels on top of the sheets to lesson the blow since we were quickly going through our supply of clean sheets and started running a load of laundry at 2:00am. Throughout the ordeal, we kept trying to get Krista and Jamison to drink to replenish the fluids that were lost but they weren't very excited about it. I happened to have some Pedialyte on hand in the pantry and after a lot of prodding, they started to drink, although much less than we would have liked.

We finally put the kids back in the crib but they continued to get sick and we feared that Kiera would start puking her guts out at any second. I broke down and called my mother, who lives a couple miles down the street, to come and help! We managed to get the sheets changed again, including our own and finally things settled down.

The next day, Jamison and Krista were obviously tired from not getting much sleep but it seemed like they were feeling better overall, other than their lack of appetite. My mother slept on the couch and got the kids up to feed them breakfast while Eric and I slept, which was much needed! Unfortunately, both of them ended up having to take the day off to help me take care of the kids and finish cleaning and sanitizing.

It wasn't until the following day that the sickness sweep came back into play. We were sitting at the dinner table eating our supper when Kiera started projectile vomiting all over herself, her high chair and the floor. Here we go again! We were really hoping that she was going to get away with not getting sick but I think the time in between only made it worse because she was the sickest of the three! We suspect it also had to do with how tiny she is but she was miserable. She also got the whole royal treatment of multiple baths, pajama changes, sheet swaps and the works but soon decided that we'd just let her sleep in her diaper because she just kept throwing up! The poor little doll! She just wanted to rest and wanted nothing to do with drinking. We would set the alarm for every hour to try and get her to sip but she would sadly shake her head "no" and push the cup away. After trying several different drinks, we had to get out the medicine dropper and put little amounts of liquid into her mouth so that she wouldn't get dehydrated. After several hours of doing this, she finally started taking sips from her cup. It was another rough night to say the least!

Unfortunately, that was not the end of the sickness sweep! The next day, Eric started feeling sick as well as my father, who had come over several times during the week to help with the children. It wasn't long before my mother followed suit and got sick as well. All this time, I was hoping and praying that I would not get sick. I figured it was probably inevitable that I too, would be getting the stomach bug but somehow, miraculously, I got away unscathed.

Thankfully, we survived and the whole experience helped to remind me how grateful I am to have healthy children and family members. I'd also like to thank the people at Clorox for those jumbo containers of wipes and Lysol for the big bottles of disinfectant spray. Your help was invaluable! I'm also thankful that we managed to escape this type of sickness to this point. The kids were so young but I think it would have been much worse with infants. Hopefully we won't have to deal with something like this again for a very, very long time!