All I Want for Christmas is Bleach

My favorite part of Halloween is when the kids are dumping out their candy after a successful night of trick or treating, and I get to put Mariah Carey on full blast over the sound system. Christmas cheer starts the minute trick or treating ends. 

I’ve always been obsessed with Christmas season. There’s no such thing as too much garland. I’ve imparted my passion on the kids and can confirm that we’re belting out “All I Want for Christmas is You” until at least February of each year (last year I finally told Mina enough was enough during Easter weekend). 

So you know that my heart hurt when Zary shared with me: “Mommy, this was my least favorite Christmas ever… because you were so sick the whole time.”

This was the most tumultuously ill holiday season I can remember. Mina kicked off three straight weeks of hacking in the last week of November and [because we just love sharing and lots of touching in this house] passed it along to all of the sisters. I got hit with salmonella the first week in December, and then something that felt like the flu set in before I was even off the nausea meds. That snowballed into a sinus infection just in time for Christmas Eve mass, and we woke up to Maisy running a fever on Christmas day. Right as we determined we’d all be healthy by NYE, we wound up instead running the midnight shuttle to the children’s ER as all three babies succumbed to norovirus. 

I’m blessed because I married an invincible man who never got sick and who carried the full load of our house for the entirety of Christmas break. CDC, you should really study him. He’s superhuman. 

I, on the other hand, am a worthless sack of potatoes with even the slightest cold. With all of the sickness lurking through the house, Nick and I were running on empty days before the Pukepocalypse of 2026 even started. I was doing my best to pretend I wasn’t deathly ill while Nick was at the hospital overnight with Mina on Friday. I woke up once around 2 AM to the sounds of Zary heaving and I rushed in to help her. About an hour later I finally crawled back into bed after Cloroxing the heck out of the bathroom. Two hours later I heard Z struggling over the monitor again. I sprinted to her room, and she cried out, “Mommy, this is my 4th time puking tonight”. Fourth?! No honey. Only your second…

“No, Mommy, I called you but you didn’t come.” I looked at the bathroom floor to see a used vom bowl I hadn’t noticed before. 

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry! Sometimes the monitor doesn’t come through. You know you can always come into my room, right?”

“I did… I carried my pukey bowl in, and I went to Daddy’s side of the bed first because I know he’s better at waking up and falling back asleep than you,” she’s not wrong… “when I didn’t see him there I walked to your side… but you were still asleep so I just went back to my room and tried to go to bed.”

“Zary, honey!” I was nearly crying. “If it’s an emergency, sweetie, you shove me, you yell, I don’t care – do what you need to do to wake me up!”

“It’s okay, mommy, it wasn’t an emergency. I already puked. I didn’t wake you up because the emergency was over.”

And while it breaks my heart that she handled that alone – and I’m still feeling that aching mom guilt three days later – it also makes me proud. Because this sweet seven-year-old not only used logical and loving reason to handle a middle of the night crisis on her own, but she was also forgiving and compassionate about my shortcomings when she told me in the morning. And when I think back to her comment about the “least favorite Christmas ever”, I know that she said that with a heart of pure gold. She wasn’t upset about the material parts of Christmas – the presents, the music, the decorations – those all still happened, and her heart wasn’t satisfied with that. She was missing the more important elements of Christmas – the intentional time spent together, going to church as a family, the closeness and cuddling that happens on a snowed in winter day. And it affirms just how proud I am of that sweetheart of a kid. She’s more mature than anyone else in this house, including me.

Zarrin is back to school this week, and I’m left at home with the younger two who aren’t remotely that emotionally stable yet. They are also still battling the stomach bug, and therefore I’m juggling eight loads of laundry a day. There have been so many bodily fluids expelled in this house in the last two weeks that I can’t even pinpoint where the smells are coming from anymore. Yesterday I found a note on my door from the town – they’re shutting off my water to tie in the new development… I know this was not intentional, but SIR! Your timing is horrific. How am I supposed to wash my hands after wiping everybody’s butt every 30 minutes? How many bathtubs of water do I need to fill to keep up with how often our toilets are flushing these days? I’m honestly a teeny little bit terrified. If I show up on your doorstep today with a shit-soaked baby… can I please just borrow your shower for a few minutes? 

Thanks for the [ironically a little bit humorous] hurdle today, Town of Ledgeview. This seems like a very on-brand way to finish out the final week of the sickest Christmas ever.