Pink, Puke, and Pedialyte

My son has a stomach bug.


Let’s just say I won’t be eating vegetable soup for a while. Or cherry-flavored Fruit Chillers for that matter. In fact, pink will have taken on a rather unsavory association for quite some time. Yesterday afternoon, Little Man was devastated when his puke was no longer colorful, his system having violently eradicated the vegetable soup for good. We solved that problem with the unwise choice of the Chiller for dinner. He woke twice since that semi-digested meal to explore what pink does on blue sheets, white towels, his mother’s clothes…. And all of upstairs reeked with bittersweet cherry odor.

We bathed the little tyke three times in six hours, and myself once. The third set of sheets is now on his bed, which put me in a tizzy because the first set had not even made it to the dryer when the second set was stripped from the bed. More laundry passed through those machines in a few hours than in the last month. A carpet I had rolled up to donate to Goodwill was an unfortunate victim of spew as well, and I heaved it into the alley by the garbage last night sometime between one spell of his vomit and an ensuing spell of diarrhea.

At one point, I banned my husband to the home office because someone in this house needed to remain well enough to care for the next puker, which I guarantee will be me in 24 hours. He supervised the damage and patiently performed concierge and nurse duties (Ginger ale, please! Bath water, please! Pedialyte, please!) only to decide that tonight just might not be a night for romance. He’d had a surprise, he said. I’m hoping it wasn’t a pink nightgown and cherry-scented bath oil.