Uh... can we get a little help here?

So our daughter has arrived at last and Mike and I stupidly thought that the toughest part of the first few weeks would be how the transition went for William. A HA HA HA HA! No, no... God thought it best to send us a little trial to let us know what we'd signed up for. And it was a whopper.

Now, a couple nights after Elizabeth came home, William threw up. But my mom was here to help, it only lasted a couple days and we all got through it with lots of Batman and movies like Bolt, Peter Pan and Cars. Whew! Test passed... right? Wrong.

My mom leaves after two weeks, Mike's mom stays for a week and at last we are on our own to try this experiment of parenting two. And what happens? William gets sick again... but this time, he does it in style.

About 2-3 weeks ago, just as Mike and I are starting to get the jist of how to break up the newborn and toddler work and still get sleep we hear on the monitor from William's room at 10:30 pm the following: cough, cough, splat... WAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH!. He's thrown up all over himself and his bed. Mike and I are upstairs like a shot. He throws William in the bathtub and I'm cleaning him up while Mike cleans up the bedroom. As we're getting everything close to cleaned up (and moving William downstairs into the office so we can watch him better), Elizabeth starts to scream, we start a bottle heating (because I'm supposed to be in bed right now for my sleep shift)... William throws up again. Uh oh, this is not looking good. He is now FREAKING OUT, we're washing another set of sheets and jammies, Mike is proceeding to feed Elizabeth and in the immortal words of Han Solo we both think "I've got a bad feeling about this". We put on the last set of clean sheets on the bed in the office, I pump another bottle for Elizabeth's next feeding so I can sleep with William, when William throws up AGAIN. Now, we're freaking out. We're running out of bedding options, out of towels, out of jammies and out of any remnants of sanity. Plus, it's now nearly 1:00 am, neither of us have slept and we're worried about William dehydrating. We call the nurse hotline and they say to just let him empty himself out and he should stop vomiting.

Needless to say, the rest of the night was shit. Pardon the french kids... but there are no other words to describe it. William proceeded to vomit every 45 minutes to an hour (the nurse was wrong... he just kept going, even when nothing was left to come up) and Mike and I were locked into an endless cycle of pump-feed-puke-wash-comfort. 12 hours later William was still vomiting and I headed to the doctor with him. My usually rambunctious son was reduced to a pale, thin, limp little teary mess and I was holding back tears. It hurt me just to look at him. As tired as I was (I literally got NO sleep), I would have done anything to be the sick one. I was told that this was going around and that I had to give William a Phenergen suppository to try to stop the vomiting (and now diarrhea) before he dehydrated enough to necessitate a trip to the hospital. I got him back home and he began running a fever as high as 104. The next few days Mike and I lived, ate and breathed a regimen of little sleep, keeping Elizabeth fed and keeping a very weak William going on Pedialyte, Gatorade and finally, crackers. It was hell. We washed every sheet and towel in the entire house and were so sick of Thomas the f@#!ing Train by the end of the week.

By the time he was well, Mike and I knew that A) we had a great story, B) we HAD signed up to be parents of 2 and that could mean more chaos than we ever thought imaginable and C) we make an AMAZING team.

Test passed...But I'm asking God if he can hold off on the Final Exam until Mike and I get some more sleep. And get the music of Thomas the Train out of our heads.