Crash and Burn

• Friday 5:30 a.m., we wake up to Meera puking
• which set into motion a whole series of events
• which ultimately led to one of our classic J-M Family "Crash and Burns"
• not the first Crash and Burn
• and surely (unfortunately) not the last Crash and Burn
• but a bad one nonetheless.
• Mid-morning the decision was made to cancel our plans for that night... a night with new friends that we had all been really looking forward to
• the boys were pissed
• by noon the baby vomit had ceased
• and the baby diarrhea had begun
• a precious "Mommy Day" (as opposed to "Margie Day") was on the rocks
• the proclamation of an extremely rare treat, "Lunch in front of a video!!!!" managed to help for a little while
• little while = length of the movie Happy Feet
• afternoon consisted of: clingy sad lethargic baby + needy annoying fighting-for-attention boys + unshowered flustered 5th-outfit-change-of-the-day (vomit, diarrhea everywhere) Mommy
• honestly, I do not recall what happened Friday night (oh wait! yes, I just remembered as I was typing that! we had a fight when Braydon got home from work, we administered tylenol to feverish Meera, we got the kids to bed, did the dishes, Braydon started in on loads and loads of vomitish diarrheaish laundry, I Cloroxed the entire house, we got take out, we watched a movie {or, more accurately: Braydon watched a movie while I fell asleep sitting upright on the couch})
• Saturday a.m. we were determined to pull it together to make it to a birthday party of a friend of the boys (felt we needed to come through with something for them to make up for the fact that they had been truly neglected for the past 24 hours)
• Little Miss seemed on the mend, so we geared up
• and got ourselves out of the house
• for the b-day party, which was another in a string of very varied, very interesting b-day parties we find ourselves attending on the double-twin-twin-b-day-party-circuit
• big blow out that night at bedtime for Owen. "big blow out" does not do it justice. it took the owen-bedtime-battles to a whole new level.
• and then... later Saturday night... wham!... the flu bug... back with a vengeance... this time... the dreaded...
• Mommy very sick.
• nothing is worse for a Mommy than having her babies sick. But nothing is worse for the family than having Mommy sick. Nothing.
• and within hours, what had been just hanging on by a thread, quickly came apart at the seams. the whole house of cards tumbling down.
• by the wee hours of the morning on Sunday there was nothing left to be expunged from the Mama's body
• Sunday was bad. Very, very bad.
• Father's Day was a complete bust. A complete bust.
• Somehow, (it is all a blur), on Sunday morning, three new Brooks Brother's shirts were presented to Papi by three loving children. Other than that, there was nada.
• Just lots of sleeping on the part of Mommy.
• And Papi trying to hold it together.
• Which is hard for the Papi to do.
• 1 baby still trying to get better (still yucky diapers, still barely eating)
• 2 boys fending for themselves and starving for attention
• The "high" of the day for Sunday, for all four of us (Meera doesn't count since she can't talk) was that Kyle and Owen got a brief 10-minute-respite from the blah; they got to ride on Pat's lawnmower late that afternoon. The "low" for all four of us was "the whole rest of the day." Nice. Not a "low" you want to have very often.
• Sunday night was an even bigger than big blow out at bedtime for Owen (we thought it couldn't get any worse than it had the night before, but alas, as usual, Owen proved us wrong and Sunday night was even worse). We vowed to take our creative strategies for peaceful bedtimes to a whole new level. We vowed we'd work on that as soon as Mama regained her strength (still had not eaten anything and had only drank 2 cans of ginger ale up until that point).
• Monday Margie arrived at 8:30 a.m. The first relief troops in four days of struggle. Mama ate toast. And napped. Papi tried to work.
• In our spare time we cross our fingers and sent up prayers with hopes that nobody else in our house gets the belly bug.
• Monday night dinner we re-grouped with a semi-"real" meal for the first time since Thursday.
• And Owen went to bed more peacefully than ever. Seriously.
• And Braydon and I watched Jon and Kate (Plus 8) crumble before our very eyes.
• And yes, the statistics are true (I've done some research; and I'm pretty good at research), for parents raising twins the divorce rate is two to three times higher than the average divorce rate.
• It is just a lot.
• And we crash and burn sometimes.
• And the whole world feels like it is tumbling down. We're reminded that this house of cards we keep piled up is oh-so-fragile. And suddenly, we see so clearly, that this thread that holds it all together is extremely thin. We crash and burn. Especially when it is Mommy out of commission. Because all those balls I'm keeping in the air just fall.
• But luckily (hopefully) it is just for a relatively short while. And we'll pick up the pieces. And put it all together again. And I'll feed attention to our kids. And fuel them with affection. And go to the grocery store. And Braydon will finish up the laundry. And we will buy more Clorox. And then the crash and burn will be behind us. And we'll forget about it. Until the next bad episode of the Crash and Burn.
• Luckily most days are better.