Yesterday, I mentioned to River that our kids have been wreaking havoc on our toilets, and we need a consistent means of keeping the bathrooms clean, non-nasty, smelling at least something like neutral. He fully agreed, acknowledging an awareness of our children’s role in the process of smell and yuck, and said that he would try to clean them once a week if possible. I do most of the rest of the regular weekly dusting, vacuuming and sweeping, and we share laundry, meal and dish duties. Regular cleaning of the bathrooms often falls on my shoulders because I’m sometimes bothered by it first, or I’m home more to look at it.
So after watching the movie “Crash” kind of late and then heading to bed, we brushed teeth at the same time and River decided that was the moment to attack the upstairs toilet. He cleaned, abraised and buffed until the thing was sparkling and shiny like new, and smelled of ripe oranges. I took a moment to tease him for taking this on simultaneously with brushing his teeth, but then got the better of myself and spent a few more sentences praising this hard work, for it was admirable, and boy did the toilet need it.
We slept for about three or four hours, and then our older son came to the bed, moaning and clutching his stomach. He got under the covers with us and writhed, moaned and whimpered some more, bringing us out of a deep sleep. He groaned that he wanted a bath. River said, “Go ahead and take one.” So he did, at 4:00 am. This woke me up fully. When one of my kids is in the bath, I don’t consider it time to sleep. I got up and talked with Paolo after a while, suggesting that he come on out as soon as possible and try to sleep more, because it wasn’t nearly time to go to school yet.
Paolo likes to consider himself the Early Bird in the family, and although I noticed that his face was sort of greenish, he had that bright look in his eye that said, “I’m up first again!” and which I take to be highly dangerous when we all need more sleep.
A short while later, after River had gotten Paolo back into his bed, and I kept trying in vain to drift back to sleep, Paolo entered our room again feeling awful: he’d just had a difficult episode, and had dashed to the toilet but had managed to soil his clothes badly with a variety of bodily substances, fearing that he had pooped in his bed (the bed was clean), but certainly dealing with vomit and poop all over the toilet and around it. One of those “everything is coming out at once” viruses where one feels a sense of adamant purging. The poor kid.
River cleaned in and around the toilet a second time, while I rubbed Paolo’s back after bringing down a few stinking handfuls of gross laundry to wash (now 5:00 am), encouraging him to do some deep breathing to get back to sleep.
It occurred to me that he has the bad stomach virus, maybe like this one family that attended the Ayyám’i'Há party we helped to host on Saturday night. Maybe that’s where he caught it. He was just getting over some other cold. And so was I.
The rough night was a reminder, for me, of what it was like having babies and toddlers. I woke up feeling like I’d been in a car wreck, my neck aching, my head throbbing, largely because I only got four or five hours of sleep and they were all choppy. Or, maybe I’m getting sick too.