A Christmas to Remember

Weston's new "Cah"

Attempting to sight read X-mas music with Westonator on my lap.
This car is a real soother! It put him right to sleep, just like the real car.

Everybody responsible for making the pheasant dinner possible. Dad, Lora and Eric did the hunting and Mom did the cooking. It was good!

Weston has had a monkey on his back lately. Literally.

"Now how do I put this thing together?"

Ashley and Eric

"Geez. It's so loud in here. I just want my giant Christmas bone already."

"Wassis?" (What's this?)

Weston's newest love-Jingle, the puppy that barks when you read the special accompanying book.

Decorating cookies with Grams

**WARNING: Parts of this post are graphic and some readers may find the contents disturbing!

Christmas 2011 is going to go down in the books as the year of the stomach flu. Based on the above pictures, you may think we had a flawless Christmas. Don't get me wrong, it was wonderful! But we would have had a little bit more Christmas cheer had we been feeling well. This stomach flu that we came down with was not your typical 12-24 hour bug. This thing wiped us out for about three-four days each. In my previous post from last Thursday, I mentioned that Tom and I were feeling OK. That didn't last for long! I wrote that post at 10 a.m. and about 2 hours later, Tom started throwing up. I went to work for the afternoon, feeling a little off but thinking that I was going to get lucky and stay well. Nope. I felt it come on strong starting around 6:00 p.m. Grams and Grandad were brought in to take the Westonator as Tom and I were both incapacitated. We each camped out in a bathroom for the next 12 hours until there was nothing left for our bodies to purge. Then we spent the next 24 hours shaking with chills and making mad dashes for the restroom. So awful.

Tom and I have been joking about 'vomiting styles' and trying to coin a term for the way each of us deals with being sick. Tom throws up the minute he starts feeling nauseated and makes loud gagging sounds while he throws up. I swear the sound echoes through the whole house. He will continue to dry heave until he is convinced everything is out of his system. Then he moves on and doesn't complain too much. I, on the other hand, tend to get hysterical when I am sick. I also wait as long as I possibly can before vomiting, even if this makes me feel terrible for several hours. Tom calls me "The Praying Vomiter" because I hurl myself over the toilet and utter crazy things like, "Please dear God make this stop! Oh God! No! I don't want to throw up! Please make it stop! I don't want to be sick! OH GOD! NOOOOO!" and then I finally throw up. In retrospect, this is all funny but it sure wasn't funny when Tom was giggling at me while I puked my brains out!

By Saturday night, we still hadn't really eaten anything but we were feeling well enough to leave the house so we figured we'd move on with our (delayed) Christmas traveling. We had a short but sweet Christmas in Buffalo with Tom's parents and Uncle Eric and then we made the 3 hour trek to Marshall. It was a loooong drive and made us both feel nauseated again but we made it without needing to stop. Christmas we nice, but we didn't partake in all the drinking and eating that is normally part of the festivities. Introducing food back into our diets has been a slow process of trial and error over the last day or so. It is now Monday and we still feel a little off. We can eat again, but our appetites seem to come and go with little waves of nausea and things are still not right in the digestive department.

We tried to stay away from people during the really awful part of the illness, but we must have still been contagious over the weekend. Jamie got it after spending only about 20 minutes in our house. Both Tom's parents felt a little sick, though they didn't get hit with what we had. Tom's brother threw up once and my brother has it right now, about as violently as we had it. I hope my brother doesn't pass it on to my parents and sister. Sorry, guys! We're going to avoid gatherings for a couple more days just to make sure this fully out of our bodies.

We're now in what I am referring to as "Stage 4" which involves cleaning up the wake of disaster we left behind while we were sick. We need to bleach all the toys and counter tops. We need to wash all the sheets, blankets, towels, etc. The toilets need some serious help. And we may even get a professional carpet cleaning (that one was Weston's fault!). On the positive side, there won't be any weight gain associated with Christmas this year and Tom was able to kick his coffee habit in just three days!

Merry Christmas (or something like that)! :)