The Dad Who Cried Wolf

The suspense and anticipation have been killing you, am I right? And you’ve been certain that the update for which you have so longed—the one about me being on Daddy Duty all weekend—would be rife with calamity and chaos, and served with a side-order of disaster.

Well, me too … and it definitely started out that way.

At around 10 o’clock Friday night, I went upstairs to do my nightly carry-the-sleeping-kids-to-the-bathroom-so-they-don’t-pee-in-their-beds thing, and as I carried my (very heavy) son to the toilet, I knew things were about to take a turn for the worse.

As mentioned in the Weekend From Hell preview, Zan had told Mommy at bedtime that his stomach didn’t feel good … which is why I knew he was screwed when I heard the normally-would-have-been-digested-by-now contents of the dinner he ate four hours earlier sloshing around in his very full stomach like three gallons of soup in a five-gallon bucket taking a ride down a bumpy road.

So I wasn’t surprised when, just as I pulled down his pajama bottoms for the previously scheduled Tinks Time, he announced that he was making a change to the agenda, with the first activity now set for Volcanic Vomiting.

“I feel like I’m going to throw up, Daddy.”

“OK. Do you want to try to go tinks first?” Hey, I figured since his pants were already down, I might as well ask. Perhaps the diversion would defuse the onset of armageddon.

“No, throw up,” he said, then leaned forward, opened his mouth wide and—you ever see a firehose turned all the way on? Yeah, like that … except, instead of water, it was everything he had eaten since he was born, plus all of the chocolate milk. In the world.

Fortunately, 99% of it ended up in the toilet bowl, and the renegade 1% mostly contained itself to that part of the porcelain where the seat screws in … there, and on my sock (just a drop, but, still … chocolate-milk puke on my white sock = ick).

There are few things shittier than not being able to make the bad thing stop when your children are scared and/or in pain … but I tried to at least make it more bearable, holding him with one arm around his chest and rubbing his back with my other hand, telling him what a good job he was doing, and how brave he was being, and that it would be over soon.

And, thankfully, it was.

I washed his face with a warm facecloth, brushed his teeth to get the skack taste out of his mouth, and carried him back to bed, all the while playing in my mind an imagined highlight reel of the hours ahead: me running up and down the stairs all night, him heaving repeatedly into The Bowl, me emptying and washing out The Bowl, him filling it again, neither of us sleeping all night, and then having it carry on throughout the following day, while I was home alone with him and his sick sister. Speaking of whom …

Once Zan drifted back to sleep, it was time to tend to Her Royal Highness, Oh She Of Much Screaming, who had been up most of Thursday night with a bad cold that I could only assume was going to get worse as the weekend progressed. Wonder Woman had instructed me to administer a dose of Children’s Motrin Cold at around 10 p.m., so, after taking Jayna to the bathroom and placing her back in her crib, I threw on my body armor and safety goggles, donned some high-frequency hearing protection, grabbed the little pacifier thing we use to administer her medicine and placed it against her lips. The peacefully sleeping child accepted it because she assumed it was her regular pacifier (and, yes, she’s way too old for a pacifier, but we haven’t yet broken her of this addiction; a plan is in the works, so there’s something else for you to look forward to reading about). One small suck later, her eyes flew open, her face contorted in panic-stricken horror and The Screaming began.

“I DON’T WANT MEDICINEEEAHAHAHAHAHAGGGGGGHHHHH!”

“Honey, it’s just a little tiny bit. Just suck it down real quick and it’ll be over.”

“NOOOOOOOIDONTWANTTOOOOOOOOAHHGHHGGHHHHH!! [COUGH-COUGH-COUGH-HACK-HACK-SCREAM-SNIFFLE-COUGH-SCREAM]”

“Sweetie, you’re sick. This will help you stop coughing and make your nose feel better.”

“RAWWWWWRRRR THIS IS SATAN AND I COMMAND YOU TO LEAVE THIS BODY ALONE OR ELSE I SHALL RENDER THE EARTH ASUNDER RAWWWRRRR!! THERE WILL BE NO MEDICINE ADMINISTERED TONIGHT!!! RAWWWRRR!!”

Or something like that.

The stuffy nose became increasingly problematic for her, because the screaming and crying, of course, only made it more stuffy, and she had somehow biochemically fused her lips together so as to prevent me from reinserting the medicine-filled pacifier.

I tried the old “Jayna, if you don’t take it, I’m going to have to bring you to the hospital so that the doctor can give you your medicine” trick, but she wasn’t buying that, so, ultimately, I held her down with one arm and kept jabbing the pacifier against her lips until she eventually opened them to scream or breathe or something, at which point I jammed it into her mouth and pleaded with her to just suck the motherfucking medicine down because Jesus fuck enough already (and, no, I didn’t actually say that to her—though I very badly wanted to).

Finally, she sucked on it, and when I removed it and held it up to examine the contents, I saw that most of the medicine was gone, thank god.

“Good job, honey. See? You did it. Good gir—” As I turned back toward her to offer more praise, I could see the pink medicine on her cheek, neck and the front of her white pajama top. This inner dialogue followed while I tried to clean up the Super Glue-like substance:

“AGGHHHHHH! Fuck this shit. Why the fuck would I wake up a sleeping child to give her medicine to help her sleep? What the fuck sense does that make?”

I decided I would ask Wonder Woman that same question as I went downstairs and entered the bedroom, where she was trying to get a few hours of sleep before her early morning departure for the airport. She, of course, was awake, because who could sleep through the cacophony of chaos that had just played out upstairs?

“He just puked,” I told her. “Like, PUKED. I thought his feet were going to come out of his mouth. And I tried to give her the medicine, which was a fucking nightmare. That was completely retarded. Why on earth did I wake her up? She was sleeping fine.”

Wonder Woman explained to me that Jayna wouldn’t have continued sleeping fine once the previous dose wore off, but I was in no mood for logic or reason or pharmacology. What I most definitely was in the mood for was for her to say, “Fear not, my darling. You don’t think I’d actually go to Atlantic City with my girlfriends and leave you in such a predicament, do you? I could never do that to you, my sweet.”

But she didn’t say that. She rose when the alarm sounded at 5:15 a.m., showered and boogied on out of town.

And that’s where the interesting part ends. Because Zan? He was fine the entire weekend. Had his appetite back Saturday morning, felt fine and kept everything down. And Jayna? Her cold had actually improved by Saturday morning. In fact, the only one whose well-being further deteriorated was Wonder Woman. The head cold she had when she left Saturday morning was in no way aided by the roundtrip plane ride, nor the late-night partying, nor the alcohol she drank, nor the very little sleep she got.

So, the battered, sick and travel-weary Wonder Woman returned from her 36-hour adventure to find freshly laundered sheets and blankets on all of the beds, clean clothing, a clean kitchen free of dirty dishes and two delightful kiddos who took it easy on their old man this weekend.

Now, seriously, I ask you: Who the hell saw that one coming?