Day 10 -- the end of the chicken story, and vomit, too!

...please read the prior posts re: chickens for the beginning of this tale...

So there Dido was, edged up to the chicken coop, a fenced in area at the end of the stables nee dairy barn at the house that may someday be our home. The chickens were scratching and running and making a noise that was neither cluck nor crow, when the boy cried out "OWWWW." For those who do not know Dido, he is, shall we say, dramatic. Inclined to the big gesture, even if the small onew would do. For those who do not know the H, you cannot, perhaps, imagine where Dido's flair for the hyperbolic arises. The rest of you no doubt saw it coming. In any case, I tend to treat yelps from my son with a calm that borders on deafness. They are frequent, and frequently come to nothing. "Mommy! I'm hurt!!!!" "Really? Did you poke yourself?" He was just at the edge of the fence--I didn't see any sharp barbs, but, entranced by the chickens myself, I hadn't been paying much attention. "No--my whole body is owie. MY WHOLE BODY." The H, bless him, said "Oh my God. He's electrocuted himself. Look at the fence." Electric. Electric fences keep out foxes, and coyotes, enemies of the lovely chickens. Ah. I have a lot to learn about country life.

But I know a lot about the instantaneous changes wrought by parenting. To whit: last night, the H and I had an honest to goodness date: "Borat" (funny, but not the second coming, for heaven's sake) and dinner at a neighborhood restaurant I'm reviewing as a trial for a website that might hire me as a writer (more on that if I get the gig and am freed of my informal non-disclosure agreement.) When we got home and sent our lovely sitter packing, I went up to the Babe's room to make sure she was comfortable; the temperature in her room is nearly always too something. She's a light sleeper, and when I went in, she said, so clearly, "Mom? Mom?" Sometimes I ignore her at night, but she was plaintive, and I couldn't resist. She was already standing in the crib when I got to her, and she was wet. Wet and....chunky. Oooh. She'd vomited, all over herself, the bed, even onto the floor. It was cold, and she wasn't crying, didn't really appear too upset. I cleaned her up, changed the crib sheet, laid down some towels, but there was no way she was going back to sleep anywhere that wasn't on top of me. So we ended up curled up together on the twin bed in her room. And so we spent the rest of the night, covered in bath towels, her puking every hour or so, generally all over us both, so we'd repeat the clean up cycle. Only mother love could make this experience well,not ok, exactly, but not nearly as horrifying as if the offending vomiter had been anyone else.

See--I don't always write about food, Miss Mieke. Take that. And so to bed.