Christmas Is OVER!

Christmas break for Andy is ending tomorrow, assuming the preschool decides to open.  Today is one of those days with a -52 degree windchill, which means nothing to me and the kids since we're warm inside.  It could be any other day on the couch except for the fact that we watched Chris leave for work wearing no less than three pairs of pants.  And except for the fact that we never stay home all day, unless it's -52 degrees windchill wise or one or more of us is vomiting like crazy.

We did the vomiting like crazy thing over the break.  Andy had the good fortune to only be ill for six hours. He woke up at three am in his own throw up.  Like an idiot, I brought him into bed with me, and also took Alex in, too, since he had been woken up by the ruckus as well.  Chris, lucky Chris, was out on the couch. Two hours later, as I was almost starting to drift off, Andy sat up, retched, and soberly declared, "I threw up on Alex."  That did not bode well, except for the fact that by nine o'clock in the morning, Andy was pretty much back to his old self.  I updated my status on Facebook to reflect the early morning vomiting I had witnessed, and a friend posted back, "Don't you just love those middle of the night baths?"  To which I mentally replied, "Baths?  Who said anything about a bath?"

So Andy was sick for six hours, and Alex was sick for TEN DAYS.  For about six days in a row, he woke up in his own vomit.  It was stinky and chunky and totally disgusting, and for the most part, happened only at night in his crib.  I was perplexed by this crib puke, googling "toddler puking while sleeping" only to come up with some terrifying explanations.  Clearly, he was having night seizures.  Clearly, he had incurred damage to his brain recently.  Clearly, his adorable little cells were being eaten alive by a bacteria that tripled in strength only in the dark and one night it was just going to consume him entirely.  Clearly, something was incredibly wrong.  Or it was just a bug.

Maybe seeing Santa made
us sick?

It was terrible.  Alex had non-stop diarrhea during the day and vomiting most nights.  Coupled with the craziness of the holidays, the kid was just miserable and didn't show any signs of recovering until the day of his eighteen month appointment, where the doctor shrugged the whole thing off as "going around" while next door, in another examination room, a much larger boy moaned to the nurse about his non-stop diarrhea as well.  Meanwhile, I furiously scrubbed as much Purell on my hands as I could pump from my little bottle and thought that, surely, every single last one of us was doomed.

But Alex recovered after those long ten days.  By this time, Christmas was over, the tree was in the trash, and Andy had thoroughly exhausted feigning even minimal interest in any of his new toys.  And let me just say, there was no reason for me to throw the tree in the trash except that by eight o'clock at night Christmas Day, I was just DONE with Christmas.  I tore the pre-lit plastic tree out of the electrical socket and tossed the whole F-ing thing right in the garbage.  Was it broken?  No.  Should I have packed it away back in its box?  Well, clearly.  But this year, between Alex's illness, my own flirtation with a version of the stomach bug, the driving six hundred miles back and forth over the span of four days, the sugary treats, the lack of sleep and schedules and naps, the horrible snowy weather, the whole damn thing- I just couldn't have been more done with any of it.  Which is a shame because this year, this year was going to be the year that I promised to be in a better mood during Christmas.  And this year, I failed again.

And while, yes, I am grateful for the generosity of others, I can't help but think that when Andy and Alex spend a whole week doing nothing but opening presents and eating candy canes, something is cracking just a tiny bit in their souls, and any sort of gratitude or thankfulness that I can instill in them falls right through until by the time they get to actual Christmas Day gifts, they are so expectant and smug about the whole thing that there really, truly is nothing I can do to get the point across that CHRISTMAS IS OVER other than to make them watch while I pack that tree in the goddamn trash can.

Anyway.  I suppose we can try this again next year when we're all a year older and that much wiser.

The thing is, part of me actually does love Christmas!  I love reading Andy (but not Alex, because Alex is the worst child to read to, ever) Christmas storybooks.  I adore Christmas movies, music, socks!  I like the whole general spirit of the thing.  But something gets lost in all this craziness, and I have to try to recapture that and figure out how to save it, because just as Christmas tends to be the time of year my mother grates on my nerves the worst, so shall my boys feel the same way about me unless I find a better way to cope with all the merry madness.

Developmental sidenote:

I finally got Alex off his two bottle a day habit.  This was actually harder than transitioning Andy two years ago.  I think that Alex may possibly be more stubborn than Andy, which is a terrifying thought.  Alex fights me on things, and the bottle was no different until finally I found a sippy cup at Wal-Mart that is basically a bottle only with the nipple thing shaped like a sippy thing.  I mean, the difference between "cup" and "bottle" here is pretty negligible, but I'm just going to go ahead and count it as a win.