Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

11:00:40 PM me@hotmail.com*: I am the best stepmother in all the land and you owe me BIG TIME.

11:01:15 PM him@hotmail.com*: What up?

11:01:43 PM me@hotmail.com: Well, my guess would be that it was about 6 orange juices, a mc chicken, fries, a large sprite, some peanut butter toast, and some other non-identifiable things.

11:02:28 PM him@hotmail.com: Don’t get it

11:02:29 PM me@hotmail.com: Let me help.   You know The Stepson?   Well, he just sat up in bed and sprayed his entire room and EVERYTHING IN IT with the thickest, most smelly, revolting projectile vomit ever vomited in the history of vomit.   It’s a vomit that would put Linda Blair to shame.   A vomit for the movies.   A vomit FOR THE AGES.

11:02:59 PM him@hotmail.com: And you cleaned it up?

11:03:01 PM me@hotmail.com: It hit Stripey**, his comics, all his clothes, everything on his floor.   It saturated his carpet, hit books on the shelf on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM, sprayed partway out the door…

11:03:01 PM him@hotmail.com: Ok

11:03:09 PM him@hotmail.com: You’re right

11:03:24 PM me@hotmail.com: …and then, while I held out a bowl with unwarranted optimism, it sprayed my hair, my shirt, my jeans and my face.

11:03:41 PM me@hotmail.com: “I think I didn’t eat very well today,” he said.  “I had a really bad diet.”

11:03:58 PM him@hotmail.com: I’m

11:04:02 PM him@hotmail.com: Um

11:04:05 PM him@hotmail.com: Ya

11:04:17 PM me@hotmail.com: “I don’t eat very well generally,” he said***.   “I learned my lesson.”

11:04:24 PM me@hotmail.com: “I feel better now though.   Sorry about the mess!”  he said.

11:04:34 PM me@hotmail.com: “At least it didn’t hit the DS!” he said.  “Probably the warranty wouldn’t cover barf!”

11:05:03 PM me@hotmail.com: So then, for lack of ANY OTHER SOLUTION, I realized that the only way to fix it, after wiping every toy/book/surface with disinfectant was to REMOVE THE CARPET FROM UNDER THE BED****.

11:05:10 PM me@hotmail.com: And get it outside.

11:05:20 PM me@hotmail.com: The smell seeping into my every pore, my gag reflex working in overtime.

11:05:33 PM me@hotmail.com: I single-handedly LIFTED UP THE BED and pulled the carpet out from underneath.

11:05:34 PM him@hotmail.com: Wow

11:05:40 PM me@hotmail.com: But wait!  The carpet is also pinned by the weight of the BOOKCASE!

11:05:49 PM me@hotmail.com: This is no problem for our hero, Super StepMother.

11:06:03 PM me@hotmail.com: She will simply LIFT THE BOOKCASE!   The smell MUST BE ERADICATED or no sleep will be had!

11:06:17 PM me@hotmail.com: The bookcase isn’t that heavy!*****   Hey, this isn’t so bad!

11:06:21 PM me@hotmail.com: But then…

11:06:24 PM me@hotmail.com: HOLY [BLEEP]!

11:06:27 PM me@hotmail.com: It IS that bad!

11:06:31 PM him@hotmail.com: Wow wow wow

11:06:55 PM me@hotmail.com: Because ALL THE THINGS BALANCED ON THE TOP INCLUDING THE 200 POUND BLOCK-MOUNTED DINOSAUR PRINT WILL ALARMINGLY AND UNEXPECTEDLY FALL ON THE BACK OF YOUR BENT-OVER NECK!  GIVING YOU WHIPLASH!

11:07:08 PM me@hotmail.com: AND POSSIBLY BROKEN VERTEBRAE!

11:07:14 PM me@hotmail.com: IN SEVERAL PLACES!

11:07:32 PM me@hotmail.com: But that’s OK now because the carpet is out from under the bookcase.

11:07:43 PM me@hotmail.com: Oh, no it isn’t!   NOT QUITE AND WATCH OUT FOR THOSE…

11:08:14 PM me@hotmail.com: INCREDIBLY HEAVY AND POINTY DRAGON STATUES AND COLLECTION OF LEAD KNIGHTS THAT WE ALSO KEEP UP THERE SO THAT IF EVER THE BOOKCASE MOVES THE PERSON UNDERNEATH IT, FLECKED WITH VOMIT, WILL ALSO GET STABBED IN THE EYE BY AN ERRANT HEAVY DRAGON WING AND WILL HAVE THEIR SKULL CRACKED LIKE AN EGG BY A SIX-INCH KNIGHT CARRYING A SEVEN INCH SWORD!

11:08:30 PM me@hotmail.com: But it’s OK.

11:08:34 PM me@hotmail.com: He has a bowl now.

11:08:59 PM him@hotmail.com: Holy [bleep].

11:09:07 PM me@hotmail.com: He figures if he feels sick again (and if he does, he will barf only acid because there cannot possibly be anything left in that human), he’ll use the bowl or… better yet! … he thinks maybe he’ll GO TO THE BATHROOM AND PUKE IN THE TOILET!

11:10:11 PM me@hotmail.com: And now every single thing he owns that is made from fabric is in the washing machine.   Not including the bedding, which will have to be done tomorrow, or the stuff in the rubbermaid tub, which will also have to be done because the vomit managed to SNEAK IN A HOLE IN THE BOTTOM OF THE TUB.

11:10:31 PM me@hotmail.com: I think maybe the vomit flecks each had their own motor and each swirled around as they flew through the air.

11:10:41 PM me@hotmail.com: Hitting things sideways, backwards, and upside down.

11:10:50 PM me@hotmail.com: So how was your evening?

11:11:54 PM him@hotmail.com: I really have nothing to report

11:12:52 PM him@hotmail.com: Wow

11:13:01 PM him@hotmail.com: That’s all I can say

11:15:20 PM me@hotmail.com: Can you say more than that?  I need a bit more.

11:15:57 PM him@hotmail.com: Thank you?

******

Oh, and for the record?  When I asked his mother later, she swore that The Stepson has NEVER thrown up at home.   How is THAT fair?   I shake my fist at you, Universe.   I SHAKE MY FIST.

* Not our actual IM names.    Although these names probably do belong to someone, it isn’t us.   So if you add these people expecting to find me or Clayton, you will be really really disappointed and may have to endure years of therapy to even partially recover from the pain.

** Name not changed to protect the identity of the lizard because he claimed he preferred it if I used his real name as it’s his only chance to be famous if just for 12 seconds and because of a vomit storm.

*** Generally speaking, he eats the following:   A muffin for breakfast (only the white kind, nothing containing bran) and an orange juice, an orange juice for lunch with perhaps a handful of deli meat and crackers,  chocolate milk, ham or chicken for dinner with raw baby carrots and pickles on the side.    On this day, he apparently ate peanut butter toast, candy, candy, candy, candy, sprite, other pop, MacDonald’s.

****  The TROMSO double loft bed from Ikea, which I must tell you is a NIGHTMARE to make and weighs a metric tonne.

***** Not really, but at that point a six foot bookshelf laden with books was no competition for my coursing adrenalin.

It does, however, have quirks. For example, the dryer leaves exactly two pieces of clothes untouched in each load. Two random pieces of clothing come out exactly as they went in: wet and totally wrinkled into an unrecognizable tiny ball because the spin cycle on the washer is FIERCE. Tyra Banks Fierce. It’s like instead of rinsing your clothes in a gentle mountain stream while deer sip water from the shore and butterflies flutter by, it hurls them into the vicious, churning white water at the base of Niagara Falls and then sucks them into the kind of tornado that throws cows and cars and houses around in a whirligig, and then just kind of also spins them around really really fast until a load of laundry that previously would fill a laundry basket is now entirely compressed down into something you can hold in the palm of your hand.

It might not be so good for “delicates”.

But it’s canyon capacity! It’s big! It washes our clothes! All of them, virtually at the same time! And that steam setting does mostly make it so I don’t have to iron!* (Or so I tell myself and those shirts are meant to be “casual” anyway and what does “casual” mean if not “slightly rumpled”?) (Rumpled is sexy!) Which is also a plus! And High Efficiency means that I hardly spend any money on washing detergent! It’s cheaper! And you use less!

This concludes my foray into consumer advising. Oh, I’m kidding. I’ll totally go on and on and on about some dull but imperative appliance in the future. Anyone know anything about gas ranges?

* OK, I admit that I never ironed anyway, but this dryer does save me from taking the shirts to the laundry and paying someone else to iron them.

Other than the coughing, they seemed OK. The mad, crazy fevers of the weekend had eased, so naturally I thought that before the doctor’s appointment, they would probably like to go to the garden center with me so I could ogle plants, a trip I sold as “a visit to the place with the bridge”. Yes, there is a bridge. Sort of. I don’t think it’s what they were imagining but it wasn’t a lie, per se. Then out of guilt, I bought them a large cookie that was bigger than both their heads combined. Then I ate most of that myself because it turns out they weren’t that hungry due to the fact they were so sick. I don’t even know why I wanted to go so badly as I ended up buying just two tiny purple plants, which I only purchased because The Bun was so emotionally attached to them that he cried so hard when I suggested we leave without them that I thought he might throw up on the floor.

Somewhere around 3:10, I realized we were already late for the doctor’s appointment on the other side of town, which was too bad because I’d just sat down for the first time all day to drink a cup of tea. That’s how it goes when you’re me. Maybe I’m just bad at time management. Maybe.

By the time I’d raced across town, found parking, and hurled the kids into the waiting room, they were some unhappy. And when I use the words “some unhappy” here in the case of The Birdy I’m using it to mean “lying on the floor sobbing uncontrollably whilst flinging her body around like she’s trying to escape from a leg-hold trap in the forest that’s in the path of a hungry, large bear”. The Bun was more stoic. In fact, he continued to “read” a book to himself in a quiet voice as though there were nothing in the world going on on the waiting room floor, the fact he can’t read notwithstanding. I was tempted to pull out my iPhone and begin a soothing game of Sudoku knowing that when The Birdy starts nothing will interrupt the Force of the Tantrum, but sadly I cannot shake the whole “what will people think” vibe, so I picked up her flailing little self and attempted to pin her arms in a stylized “hug” such that she couldn’t punch me in the head. It’s these kinds of events that make everyone else in the waiting room ask the doctor for permanent birth control surgeries. Even the ones well past the age of fertility.

I digress. This doctor is new to us. He’s very nice, in fact, an old family friend. However, every time he speaks, I translate it in my head into LOL speak. I can’t help it.

Dr: Hai, how iz kidz?
Me: They have bad coughs.
Dr: They iz better?
Me: No, iz worse.
Dr (lifting The Bun): Bun iz heavy!
Me: Yes.
Dr: Glands iz swollen!
Me: Yes.
Dr: Iz better tho!
Me: ?
Dr: Birdy iz worse! Antibiotics iz gud.

You get the idea. By the time we left, The Birdy had stopped screaming and was actually pretty upbeat. Off we went to Safeway to fill the prescription and get groceries.

Sounds easy!

Not easy.

Safeway is one of the stores that have those giant grocery carts with a plastic car-like contraption with pretend steering wheels on the front where you can jam your kids, such that they are at the maximum allowable distance from you at the same time as being too close to each other to not poke each other repeatedly in the eye and then claim they didn’t do it. Sometimes the carts make the kids happy; however, more often than not, they try to push each other out of the thing while screaming the toddler-equivalent of obscenities. They had plenty of time for this while I waited in a line of two people for the pharmacy counter. I’m not sure why the guy in front of me thought that the pharmacist would care/understand/want to know about how back surgery would be better for him than continuing to feed his addiction to prescription pain killers, but after about twenty minutes, we were all pretty much up on the details. The Bun had escaped from the cart and was wheeling The Birdy around at high speed, made extra dangerous by the fact that those carts are about eight feet long and impossible to steer. Shoppers were darting out of the way and fixing me with steely glares, while I stared straight ahead and pretended they could not penetrate my invisible armour with their eyeball blades of red-hot anger. Then I pretended that my invisible armour actually rendered ME invisible! Then I pretended that I was leaping over the counter — invisible! — and grabbing the medicine I needed and running from the store! And that my kids were invisible, too!

Then it was our turn.

Insert boring story here about insurance.

Checking out at Safeway is always a nightmare because you are not allowed to push the eight-foot car-like cart extravaganza filled with recyclable (OK, I ADMIT it, I forgot them again. Just this ONCE.) grocery bags to your car. You must trade it for a regular cart. This is because the temptation to steal the two-hundred pound monstrosities is infinitely too overwhelming to most shoppers. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have one of their very own, perhaps in their living room?. After just one too many people wrestled one into their moving-truck car and made off with it, Safeway decided that shoppers can no longer be trusted to use the prized cart cars outside of the store, even accompanied by a Safeway-employed chaperone. Not even a uniformed chaperone. With a gun. Needless to say, prying the kids out of The Beast in the tight confines of the buggy aisle is a challenge at best. For one thing, after torturing each other mercilessly for an hour, they’ve finally decided that they love it in there and NOTHING IN THE WORLD is more fun. For another thing, they can hold the door-thingies so you can’t get them out, and watching you struggle amuses them, much like the words POOP and STOOPID and knock-knock jokes with unrelated punch lines. I finally extracted the hysterical Birdy, who was having none of it, and who then proceeded with a repeat of her above-detailed temper tantrum. Sadly, there was no room on the floor to deposit her, so I again had to hold on to her while she punched and kicked, screamed, sobbed, and interspersed the show with pathetic-sounding coughs which made me look like an evil ogre (who perhaps ought to be reported to Social Services for having her anywhere outside of tucked into a tidy bed, perhaps in a hospital). The Bun was instructed firmly (i.e. I shouted at him) to get out of the cart, which he attempted to do by somehow diving headfirst out the fake windshield, landing on his head/neck/bent-back finger somewhere near my feet. He commenced wailing. I tried to bend over to hug him, but with my destroyed discs I cannot bend while holding 30 pounds of flail’n'wail. While I received plenty of sympathetic/annoyed/enraged looks from fellow shoppers, the cashier seemed entirely oblivioius to the drama. I admire someone who can overlook so many moving limbs and outpourings of snot and tears. I’m sure he’ll make a good parent one day.

Finally back in the car, I shuttled my now-exhausted offspring on one more errand — picking up a package at Sears because they will only hold them for ten days and it was day eleven already. Loading them into the car for the last time, I realized that somewhere along the line we’d lost The Birdy’s jacket. I liked that jacket. My mum bought it in Hawaii and both kids had nearly worn it out and it was cute. Suddenly I was more emotionally attached to that missing jacket than to any other article of clothing ever. I felt like crying. Where is the green jacket? MUST FIND THE GREEN JACKET.

I called Safeway. No, they didn’t have the green jacket. It was likely somewhere in the store, they surmised, but they wouldn’t go look for it, rather they would wait for someone to turn it in. Then they would call me. If they found it. Which, by the way, was unlikely. Because people didn’t turn much stuff in, when it came right down to it, they were likely to keep my green jacket. Oh, and what colour was it again? Could I describe it? So that when they were flooded with jackets in the lost and found, they would know which was mine?

I had a vague memory of removing the jacket at the doctor’s office, so I called them, but they were gone for the day. Now desperate for the green jacket, I decided to retrace my steps in the car, in case perhaps one of the kids had hurled it out the window while we drove. And would you believe it? While driving down the street, we found the green jacket tied to someone’s fence. It’s true, internet. Sometimes, there are green jacket miracles.

I was so happy, I may have wept a bit. Or maybe I was already weeping. It was that kind of day.

When we got home, I realized that I only had a portion of my groceries. Where were the rest of the groceries? Once again, I called Safeway. If you want their number, let me know, I have it in my mental Rolodex now. Yes, we’d left a bag behind. Yes, they knew what was in it. Well, they knew one or two of the things in it, but they’d put it all back on the shelf. Yes, my husband could come and get it, but he had to ask for “Tim” after finding “Tim” at one of forty-seven checkout lines because “Tim” was the only one who had access to the mystery of my missing bag and what was in it ONLY TEN MINUTES BEFORE. Items that they had returned to the shelf with the kind of speed that superheroes use to rescue babies from burning eagle’s nests at the top of giant sequoia trees, because ONE OF THE ITEMS IN THE BAG WAS FROZEN. Apparently, there’s a rule. Whoever writes the rules at Safeway must really enjoy themselves. No carts in the parking lot! No looking for lost articles! No bags left behind for more than fourteen seconds without being dismantled if frozen fries are involved!

I carefully detailed the missing items, reading off the receipt. Yes, said “Tim”, the bag would be there for Clayton to pick up. How many bananas were in there, again? There were no bananas. Oh, right. How many apples? Er, no apples. Laundry soap, juice boxes, fries. Oh, OK. How many potatoes?

NO POTATOES. I was starting to contemplate adding random items to the list. Like wine. Or perhaps whiskey. If only you could buy those things at Safeway.

You know where this is going, right?

I wasn’t there, so I can’t provide details, but eventually, Clayton says he just grabbed the bag and ran amidst a fray of confusion: “Tim” wanted him to pay again, no one knew what was in the bag to begin with, the grey-haired clerk insisted he go home and get the receipt, etc.

Many hours and debacles later, I stumbled to bed. I was just drifting off when I heard The Birdy start to cough again. And cough. And cough. And… wait, that wasn’t a cough, that was a projectile vomit! Hello, middle-of-the-night bed-making baby-changing fun!

The good news is that our new dryer is supposedly arriving today sometime between noon and five. And tomorrow, maybe, or some other time, we’ll have it hooked up. And none too soon. I have lots of sheets to wash.

So how was your day?

Edited to add pics of The Green Jacket. Just so you can see why I’m so unreasonably attached:

The poor Birdy is sick and sick translates loosely to “inconsolable” if you speak toddler, which luckily I do. Well, sort of. Not well enough to know what she was screaming about all night, but enough to know that she wasn’t feeling well. The fact that holding her was giving me second-degree burns was also a bit of a giveaway. I medicated her and sang to her and whispered stories about ponies (OK, they weren’t so much “stories” but lists of different colours that ponies could conceivably be. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how this soothes her. She likes ponies, what can I tell you?) This basically filled all those boring hours between “bedtime” and “waking up” when one normally nods off due to lack of better things to do. “Pink ponies, green ponies, yellow ponies, blue ponies,” I whispered. “Rainbow coloured ponies.” I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking, “Rainbow coloured ponies! That’s wicked!” Or you’re perhaps thinking, “Rainbow coloured ponies? No wonder that poor kid was screaming.” Either way, it amounts to the same thing: regardless of the different manifestations of ponies I could conjure up in her imagination, she preferred to cry and occasionally scream random words like “MONKEY” and “PEN” (both a large part of her vocabulary, to be true) in a sort of baby-version of Tourette’s, while I seethed with visceral, slimy green envy towards all who may be sleeping anywhere in the world for any reason whatsoever. Occasionally, if I started to drift off, lulled into happy dreams by my own Little Pony imagery, she’d kick me really really hard in the sternum or the eye, which made it a bit tricky to be sympathetic, if I’m being honest. Eventually, I gave up and we just lay beside each other and cried, one of those mother-daughter things that brings us closer together.

Needless to say, at 6:30 a.m., I rose fresh and alert, looking like a daisy dipped in gentle morning dew, with a spring in my step and a twinkle in my eye. No, that’s a lie, too! I actually got up, dropped the screaming Birdy and the also-feverish-and-woke-up-too-soon Bun on Clayton and I went back to bed. It’s approximately the first time in this decade that I’ve gone back to bed after everyone else is up and frankly it was the most awesome thing ever. EVER. Remember your first Caribbean vacation? The one where you had your own private plunge pool? It was like that but even more fantastic. I’m not making it up. Sleep = nirvana. Period.

So the second time I woke up (overlooking the fact that I didn’t actually “wake up” the first time), I awoke feeling optimistic and less like I was paralyzed below the waist. (Due to a strange disc issue the details of which I will bore you with later, my limbs go sporadically numb, particularly when I’m tired). I was optimistic because today, dear reader, is delivery day of the washer/dryer/Fairy Godmother combo that we sacrificed our children’s future college education fund to purchase last week. Laundry! Machines!

Needless to say, these things never go as you plan. For example, the delivery guy was supposed to arrive between noon and five. So it made nothing but sense that at 11:00 a.m., the phone rang and the delivery guy cheerfully announced that he was early. Which was terrific for him, no doubt, but we had not yet cleared the area for the washer and dryer to land. Clayton got right to work while I sat blankly on the couch, ignoring the children, and fantasized about doing laundry — or rather, having my new Kenmore Fairy Godmother doing my laundry while I turned the appliance box into a garden cottage for the kids to play in — clutching my life-giving coffee in my hand. Eventually, I heard the loud clattering sound that indicates that a large truck is discharging an appliance on our front lawn and peered out the front door to see the delivery guys hunkered down beside what I assumed was meant to be our dryer, but actually looked like a CSI murder victim that should really have been cordoned off behind yellow police tape.

“You don’t want this,” the delivery driver accurately stated.

“Did you drop her, I mean, it?” I said, aghast, and also ready to start pinning blame right away because that is what I do.

“No,” he denied. “It was clearly a forklift! Look at the diameter of the dent and the DNA analysis of the chipped paint! It is Sears’ fault!” As obviously correct as his analysis was, this did not prevent me from giving him the steely glare of a wronged customer. Hey, I only slept for two hours. I can’t be nice all the time.

“Hmm,” I said, in a voice intended to convey Grave Displeasure, because that is what I was feeling.

Which really pretty much killed the conversation. What else can you say? The Fairy Godmother was gone. There was no use belabouring the point.

They proceeded to deliver the washer with no actual damage being incurred, which is a good thing and perhaps the silver lining to this story. I feel like this would be a better post if they’d brought the wrong one or dropped it on the way in or SOMETHING, but the didn’t. It looks fine. They brought it inside, removed the box, and took the box.

Took the box?

TOOK THE BOX.

What about my kids’ country garden cottage? I wanted that box.

“Can I please have the box?” I asked politely.

“Sure,” said Guy A.

They all disappeared. I stepped out the front door to receive my box.

“Sorry, you can’t have it,” said Guy B. “I need it to store my cardboard.”

“Uh?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “That sucks, doesn’t it? I know how kids love them.”

“?” I said. “????” It was like a whole flock of question marks was circling my head, randomly pooping in my eye. I blinked. “?”

“Maybe when they bring your dryer, you can have that one,” he said helpfully, if by “helpfully” I mean “not helpfully”.

And the zoomed off. With my box. My box! Basically my plan was to use the box to entertain the children for the duration of the week (don’t laugh, it would have worked, kids love boxes), so now our calendar is wide-open. If you’re looking for a playdate, call me. We won’t be busy playing in the backyard with the box, that I can guarantee. Actually, we won’t be doing laundry either, so I guess I have to worry less about what to do to entertain the kids while I’m catching up on clothes washing. Maybe it all balances out in the end.

We now are the proud owners of two washers and zero dryers and zero boxes, but I suppose that’s better than having no large appliances filling up the basement gym area and having all the gym equipment jammed into my office, which is giving me anxiety because it’s really really important to my general state of mind to have at least one room that is relatively tidy and not crammed full with items that do not belong in said room.

Apparently, another dryer/Fairy Godmother will be kept in a Safe House for its own protection until the 16th, whereupon it will be given a new identity and transported to our house in the dead of night in an unmarked car. We’ll see how that goes. Stay tuned.