It is 2:20am, and I just came in from my balcony. Just how long I was out there exactly, I couldn’t say – 15 minutes, maybe 20, maybe longer. At least 20 degrees cooler out there than inside my condo, I sat and well, basically just zoned out. Occasionally, above the white noise of Route 95 traffic about a mile to my west, I would hear the sounds of at least two distinct sets of wind chimes as the tiny breeze tickled them just so. I wonder what genius invented wind chimes. I’ll have to google that later, when I’m awake.
So what drove me to my balcony at such an ungodly hour? Insomnia? The heat? How I wish it were something so simple!
While it is warm inside with the air conditioning currently on the fritz, I have a fan beside my bed which makes it comfortable enough to sleep. With my stomach still not feeling quite up to par after my bout with (what I thought was) food poisoning, I went to bed shortly after 10pm. At 12:47am, I was awakened by a sound I don’t normally hear – my daughter running for the bathroom. In my half-asleep stupor, I heard her say, “I threw up,” but it took a few moments for the true meaning of those words to sink in.
She said that on her way *in* to the bathroom, not on her way out.
I closed my eyes briefly, hoping against all hopes that this was just a terrible dream, and I would wake up any second, but it was not to be. As I could hear Megan in the bathroom, um…finishing the job…I took a deep breath, forced myself out of bed, and went into her room to survey the damage.
All I can say is, I’m going to sue someone. If they are going to film the next sequel to The Exorcist in my daughter’s bedroom, shouldn’t I have been asked to sign some kind of consent form or something? If it hadn’t been so completely disgusting, and I hadn’t been fighting back the urge to join her in the bathroom, I would have taken a picture, because surely she has broken some sort of world record. I’m thinking “Most Surface Area Covered By A Single Vomiting Episode.” Oh. My. God.
Before I could even begin to decide how to clean up her bedroom, I went to check on her in the bathroom. Crime Scene #2. That’s the last time I ever let her eat Spaghetti-O’s for dinner!
I won’t get into the specifics of the cleaning process, but as I worked on her bedroom, she decided she now needed a toilet that was clean enough to sit on, and moved into *my* bathroom. All I could think of was, “Oh, no, not another one! I can’t clean anything else tonight,” so when I heard her warming up for the third inning, I felt the need to step in.
Apparently it has been so long since my 14-year-old has been sick, that she does not know *how* to throw up. I walked into my bathroom to find her standing upright in front of the toilet with the seat still down. (At least the lid was up, I’ll give her that!) No wonder she got more on the walls than in the toilet in the other bathroom. I immediately gave a lesson on Barfing 101:
Lesson 2: Get your head closer than 5 feet away from the place at which you are aiming.
Crisis averted, at least I saved myself from having to clean *that* bathroom, too.
Once I had cleaned her bedroom (it was even on her sneakers and backpack!), put new sheets on the bed, and made sure her fan was on, I moved on to her bathroom. I cleaned as much of that as I could take before I retreated to the balcony, where this story began. The rest can wait until the morning, since at this point it looks like I’ll be staying home from work.
Apparently the illness that I thought on Sunday had been caused by a slice of bad leftover pizza, was in fact a virus. I *so* hate it when Sharon is right…
**UPDATE** Round 2 began around 3:20am. I hadn’t even gotten to sleep after the first session yet. Thankfully, this time her aim had improved, and she made it in the bucket.
**UPDATE #2** Round 3: 4:35am.
**UPDATE #3** Round 4: A double play at 5:52am – both ends at the same time! One made it into the bucket…the other, sadly, did not…