The good news is that the Muffin Man has recovered from his nasty bout with the stomach flu. The bad news is that I AM A TERRIBLE MOTHER. I am so traumatized and psychologically damaged from this week's incident of bad parenting that I can only imagine the irreparable harm it caused my son. Seriously, I think I'm going to have anxiety dreams about it for the remainder of my natural life.
As you know if you're a faithful reader of the ol' blog (as you should be), I spent the balance of my Valentine and President's Day weekend covered in toddler vomit. As horrible as this was for me, I can't imagine that it was any more pleasant for Noah, seeing as he spent much of the weekend throwing up anything he ingested. By Sunday evening I assumed we were through the worst of it and that Noah would be on the mend the following day. He hadn't been his usual chipper self for most of the day, but he also hadn't had any episodes of projectile vomiting for over 24 hours, so I hoped that meant he was simply tired from fighting a bug. Although I found it marginally concerning that he didn't eat very much dinner that night, I was happy that he feel asleep without incident, allowing me to enjoy several hours of kid-free Downton Abbey viewing and a nice glass of rosé.
At one point during some pivotal scene of which I was only able to understand one word out of three, I heard Noah start crying upstairs, but I didn't think much of it, as he often wakes up and cries only to fall right back to sleep a few minutes later. True to form, he stopped crying almost immediately, and when I checked the monitor he appeared to be sleeping peacefully. After getting our fill of melodrama for the week, we headed upstairs to get ready for bed. Normally we don't check on Noah before we turn in because we have a video monitor and also because he's a light sleeper, but something made the Hubby decide to look in on him Sunday night. Well. What did Chris discover but that Noah had barfed all over himself and his bed and was, in fact, sleeping in a puddle of his own vomit. That's right, my friends, while I was blissfully sipping a reasonably priced, yet expensive tasting, glass of French wine, my sweet, adorable little baby boy was projectile vomiting all over his bed and being left to fend for himself. What if, horror of all horrors, he had choked on his own barf and asphyxiated while I was lost in the fantasy of a 1920's Engligh country estate?! Thankfully, this worst case scenario did not transpire, and I've been saved from a future lacking in both Noah's company and Masterpiece Theater.
Despite my overwhelming guilt at the fact that I almost let my son sleep through the night covered in puke, I managed to pull myself together and get everything and everybody cleaned up. I gave my kiddo an extra long cuddle before we put him back to sleep that night, partially to assuage my guilt, but mostly as it was the only way I could think of to communicate how sorry I was that I didn't come running right away when he cried out, as would a woman who is truly a good Mother. Needless to say I left the volume on the baby monitor all the way up on Sunday night, and I only slept about twenty minutes.
Noah seems to have forgiven me for my Motherhood shortcomings, thank goodness. I, on the other hand, have scheduled six weeks of daily phone sessions with my therapist in a sad (and very expensive) attempt to assuage some of my guilt.
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