Some Day We'll All Laugh Over This

Right?

This week I faced one of my greatest fears, and now we are crawling out from under the rabble. On Monday, right before dinner it began with little Bophie, followed with poor Juju, then in the middle of the night it struck sweet GabyBaby. By Wednesday it had knocked me for a loop, and then dragged down poor Bear who spent the night on a rug in my bathroom. Yes, the dreaded stomach bug. It had been going around and I knew there was little chance of escape.

I thought we had done a pretty good job of maintaining some order during this chaos. As soon as it started on Monday, I began washing any dirty laundry I could find knowing it would mount exponentially as more children got sick, and it did. So far it has skipped Banana who has been an amazing help in all this ordeal. She kept little ones entertained, she cleaned, she liked pretending to be the babysitter. All this helped to keep things fairly together.

Still the laundry has been piled on the couch all week in various stages of being folded and put away upstairs. The house is for the most part tidy, but in no way clean. Then there is my appearance. I am sure no one feels glamorous when stricken with the flu, but having the flu and trying to tend to other little ones with the flu left me particularly out of sorts.

So imagine my HORROR surprise when last night the doorbell rang. Thinking it was probably just some sort of door-to-door salesman, I did my best to hide out of sight. Turns out, I wasn't that lucky. In fact I am not sure I could think of a worse scenario. It was our social worker. She was there for Joseph's one year post adoption report. I had scheduled it weeks ago, but for some reason thought it was Wednesday night and that dh must have canceled it knowing I was down for the count. Actually, dh had forgotten all about it.

So there she was. There wasn't even a place for her to sit. A sick child laying on one couch, Mt. Neverest of laundry on the other. Various piles of folded laundry scattered throughout the rest of the room. I was in jammies (not even nice ones), with bedhead, no makeup, changing another of the endless diapers that follow a stomach bug, with no place to hide, no rock to crawl under. To add to that it was bedtime for four children in various stages of recovery in no mood to have Mom and Dad have a conversation with someone else. Alas, she was there, and the report had to be done.

We answered questions, the kids did surprisingly well. She sat on the floor doing her best not to touch a single thing in our germ-infested house. When at last that act of humility came to an end, we closed the door, put the kids to bed, and went to bed ourselves hoping that sleep would help.

Some day I'll laugh about this, right?