PuKING

It took 6 straight hours of midnight puking for me to finally blog again. ... I hope you thoroughly enjoy this.  Let me start with how we envisioned the night would go.  For the past few weeks I've been at work from 5:30 am to 5:30 pm, and Saturdays from about 6 to noon, trying to get a grasp on this new position and vault myself ahead of the chaos rather then constantly feel like I'm playing catch up.  Another back story: we finally bought Rosaline a crib.  She had gone from the bassinet to a pack and play where she stayed the last several months partially because we didn't think the crib would fit in our room and partially because we kind of thought we'd find a house to move into "any day now".  Any day has not come but the day she was too big for the pack and play did.  We pulled the old crib out of storage and - walla - there were no screws or hardware whatsoever. ... just a bonfire worth of non toxic, white painted wood.  So, we bought a new crib which came in last week.  This is the first non hand-me-down Rosaline has gotten, so she kind of earned it.  Anyway, I came home from work yesterday at noon and promptly set up the new crib.  We had visions of her wonderful night sleep in an actual bed and not a collapsible travel device intended for a few days on vaca while visiting the in-laws in Tucson.  In addition to that fantasy I was also, personally, looking forward to sleeping in for the first time in ages.  Maybe rising after the sun for once.  So much so that we even went to bed early to make sure I could get as much rest as humanly possible.  Let me stress that it turns out a human and a dad have very little in common.  Aside from flesh, blood, bone and a 5 o'clock shadow, there is nothing human about fatherhood.  At midnight Arianna climbed on top of me in bed crying.  Crying AND covered in vomit.  Gina took her to the bathroom and I was sent to clean up the bed.  Flashback, two nights prior Rosaline had the same incident and I took the sheets outside to shake them out before putting them in the wash.  You know how you shake out a beach towel and the sand inevitably flies back in your face as the bottom of the towel pops with a snap?  Yeah. ... a little more disgusting when it's vomit and not sand.  The taste of that incident still in heavy in my mouth I balled up these sheets and left them outside for the raccoons to fight over; if they were still there in the morning I would hose them down.  The sheets, not the raccoons.  I came back to our room to find Arianna in the middle of our bed with a vomit bucket - long time readers may remember this bucket; it started out as a mixing bowl last December and hasn't been the same since.  For the next two and a half hours we played catch the puke while trying to squeeze in what minuscule shut eye we could in between rounds.  Finally, my wonderful wife - she really is wonderful - offered to take Arianna  (who had run out of undigested food by now) back to her room where she would sit with her while she dry heaved so that I could get some kind of sleep.  Bless her.  Arianna must have nodded off and Gina came back to bed because a half hour later, right around 3am I woke up to see Genevieve standing in the middle of our room looking at us.  "Honey, are you ok?" I asked.  She made it clear she was not by responding with a heavy vomit on the floor in front of her.  Everything that happened in the last few paragraphs played out again with twin #2 this time.  I swear I went to the kitchen to wash out the puke bowl at least 19 times between midnight and 6 am.  Somewhere around 5 Arianna joined back in the mix and it was a surround sound IMAX kind of experience.  Once again my wonderful wife took them both back to bed around 5:30 and sat with them catching vomit and explaining things like why the cat would smell the foul bowl from hell.  Genvieve, thank god, thought it was gross.  So now, running on few minutes of sleep I blog for you once again.  I have no idea if there is any coherency to this post; but as Gina pointed out we didn't finally exit bed for good until 8:30 this morning so, technically. ... I got to sleep in finally.