Ahh...home sweet home....

Typhus, typhoid, H1N1, cholera – god only knows what it is but disgusting sickness has descended on our chaotic home like a biblical plague. Winston has been spewing fluid from both ends for a week now and totters pathetically around on stick legs looking every inch like a poster child for a children’s charity serving the third world; Topher is leaking thick, viscous green snot from his nose like nothing I ever want to see or experience again in my lifetime and clutching his neck screaming “it hurts right to my bones!”; husband is snuffling and shuffling around the house like a dishevelled sanatorium in-patient; father-in-law is lumbering (barely) pathetically from room to room when he isn’t lying in bed groaning, while mother-in-law and I carry on, feeding, bathing, wiping, swiping, stripping beds, doing laundry….all the while popping any pill that even remotely promises to get us through another hour without collapsing in feverish heaps.

But I think we may just have begun the long climb out of this fetid darkness….this morning, after the carpenters arrived at 6:30 a.m to continue building the front porch following a two-week unexplained absence, after pulling the dog out of the tipped over trash bin where she was supplementing her scientifically approved diet with day old shrimp shells, rotting lemons and something that for the life of me I still can’t identify, after getting the sofa ready to be picked up and replaced due to leaching leather dye (sometime between 9 and 1 o’clock today – could they be any more vague?), after husband announced he had a flight booked to leave this afternoon and would be gone on business until the weekend, after emptying the dishwasher, making 3 breakfasts, organizing the day’s wash which in addition to the usual boy mess included the previous night’s fun and entertainment of feces-covered baby blankets and 2 quilts, after trying 4 times without success to have even one sip of my coffee, I surveyed the scene and realized: Topher was not gripping his neck in agony, Winston was actually eating some solid food and drinking again with real gusto, father-in-law was well enough to surface before noon to wait for his food to magically appear before him, mother-in-law was calm and in control, and the sun was actually shining. So I did what any self-respecting, intelligent, exhausted woman would do – raced for a shower, dressed, grabbed my car keys and headed to the office where at least I had the faint hope of getting to drink a cup of warm, if not hot, coffee. And here I will stay until duty forces me back to the little bit of hell that is my home to chauffer family members to doctor appointments and then make dinner, clean up toys, bath, nurse, sing to and cuddle two little boys into bed, and then pour myself the world’s biggest, coldest, driest martini on record.

Wish me well. It has already been a very, very long day.