Breaking the Cardinal Rule of Motherhood

I broke the cardinal rule of motherhood the other night. That is: Moms don't get sick. This one sure did. I greeted Jeff at 6 p.m. with, "Take this baby. I have to go throw up." And I abandoned him with three fussy babies who were also getting sick and Amelia.

I did call in some reinforcements for the night feeding and for the evening. When you call someone and say, "The babies are throwing up and I am too. Can you come hold babies for a little while?" and they show up, those are GOOD people!

I threw up until midnight. The boys started a few hours after I did and threw up about 6 hours, too. Jeff slept in the nursery with them in the crib and in pack and plays. He put towels under them and just kept changing the towels. On the plus side, the boys just wanted to go right back to sleep after they threw up.

At 4 a.m., Sam needed to be walked, and by then I wasn't nauseous, so I took him for a while so Jeff could sleep. That next day was a little rough, since my whole body hurt from throwing up and the boys weren't feeling well either. One of my terrific neighbors did come over for a couple hours in the afternoon to help hold fussy babies. We rocked and walked while we watched the NCAA games. We even got two of three babies down so I could take a quick nap, which helped a lot.

Jeff spent Thursday at a conference where he had to do two presentations, so he didn't have an easy road either. But, we made it through, again with a little help from our friends.

Fortunately, the virus was short-lived, and mostly contained to throwing up. Sam and Isaac both ran a little low-grade fever the next night, but no scary high fevers or anything like that.

Now we're headed into the weekend and the boys pretty much back to their usual bright-eyed, happy selves.

Oh, and in cheerier news around here, Sam rolled from his back to his belly on Thursday and Isaac did it tonight, so all of the boys can roll over both ways now. Pretty soon they'll be rolling across the room -- undoubtedly all in different directions at once! I know that news calls for a new picture of each Sam and Isaac, but that will have to wait until later. Now I need some sleep!