It was supposed to be one of those weekends you wish you could skip, one of those weekends so full of Important Things To Do that you'd rather fast forward to the part where they're done and maybe go to work because you need a vacation from your days off. On that list was a trip to the dentist complete with a root canal and a birthday party featuring approximately the entire population of screaming Yinzer kids.
So. You know. Painful. It was supposed to be a very painful weekend.
Can I please have it back so we can have a do-over following the plan? PLEASE?
The only way things can go from root canal/birthday party to worse is if you are awakened by a short person whimpering, "My belly hurts." That is most definitely how you can go from bad to worse in a hurry.
Alexis whimpered the words at the buttcrack of not yet dawn o'clock Saturday, and frankly I wasn't totally shocked. She had stayed up entirely too late the night before gleefully making cookies with a friend. There were lots of sprinkles involved. Lots and lots and lots of sprinkles.
Not pictured: the 829345103409135 sprinkles that fell on the floor and the approximately 243569246 sprinkles that wound up in Alexis' mouth.
I know. I KNOW.
The kid doesn't like sweets. We are all aware of this fact. Could you tell her that, please? She doesn't seem to be able to remember it at times, so she goes and tries to act like a normal kid and she mainlines sweets. The last time she did it there were Tootsie Rolls involved and it ended in puking.
"My belly hurts." Massive quantities of sugar. I know this story well.
Which is why we told the kid to suck it up and try to sleep a little longer. It sort of worked, I think. Maybe. I'm not sure if she was actually asleep or not because I was getting kicked in the face and it was way too early o'clock and really my brain doesn't show up for work under those sorts of conditions.
A few hours and a miserable dentist appointment later, Alexis seemed ... OK. Not quite right, but not really terrible either. One minute she was complaining she felt sick, but the next minute she was running around the house chasing a very scared Muppet-faced puppy. So we piled into the car and headed for the birthday party.
All the way there, Alexis went back and forth between "My belly hurts" and "I can't wait for the party!" She was fine. Then she wasn't. Then she was. And then she wasn't. But maybe she was?
The birthday party was at one of those giant bounce house emporium-type places.
So.
So I made an executive decision and ran the gift in and then ran back out to the car to take Alexis home. I decided that she would be benched for the day because if ever there was a place where the stability of a kid's belly shouldn't be tested, I think it's at a bounce house.
I called it right.
We made it less than a mile before The Sick took over and Alexis started suffering from what turned out to be a 24-hour bug. She was mostly fine, except for the times when she was, you know, puking her guts out.
But at least she wasn't puking inside a bounce house.
