Merry Sickmas!

(disgusting but sadly appropriate graphic found here)

We’re home from Portland, and I must say, it was a mixed bag of a vacation. We arrived on Saturday evening, and my poor dad was feeling fine, but then not so fine, and by the end of the evening he had all of the oh-so-fun symptoms of either stomach flu or food poisoning. Yay. We all hoped for food poisoning (so it would go away quickly, and so no one else would get sick), and washed our hands a lot.

Too bad, it was stomach flu, and the good news kept coming in. My sister, brother-in-law, and niece had a variation (though thankfully not my 3 month old nephew!), my step mom came down with it on Christmas Eve, and plans were changed. We were supposed to be spending a lot of quality time with family, and we ended up spending a lot of quality time by ourselves. One of my sisters brought her kids over one afternoon for awhile, and we had a good time playing with them. My little niece is going on 2, and very happy to be able to communicate verbally. It was fun. But they couldn’t stay long, as it was getting close to melt down time for that age bracket. We were house and dog sitting for a big Golden named Norbert, who had poop about 15x as big as Genevieve’s. Blech. I’m sorry to say, we tried to get him to poop away from lawns, and then we left it, because it was FAR too gross. (I did pick it up once, when it was placed where someone might easily step in it.)

Our plans to hang out with my dad and step-mom mostly fell apart. We did go see The Golden Compass (we had planned to see it with them, but saw it by ourselves instead), which we really enjoyed, though Ted said it was a bit confusing, as he hadn’t read the book first. Christmas morning, I woke up at about 1am with that glorious feeling that the stomach flu had found its way to my digestive tract, which surely put a damper on things. Christmas was moved from Dad’s house to Sister’s House, though everyone but my poor Grandma was able to attend. (She has Alzheimer’s, so we could probably lie to her and tell her she DID attend, and she wouldn’t know any better. But we would have remembered it, and she would have enjoyed it while she was there, so it was indeed sad that she couldn’t make it.)

The day after Christmas, Maya discovered that she was ill as well, and that night was one of the worst I’ve ever spent…me in one bathroom, her in another, both feeling like absolute crap, and Ted trying to help us through it all. I don’t know how he didn’t come down with anything, but he seems OK thus far.

Yesterday we flew home, and I have to say, I’m sick of security regulations. Sick of taking off my shoes to fly, sick of being wanded for wearing a bracelet through security (bangle that I have to soap up to remove from my hand), sick of having my bags searched and the gifts that were wrapped torn open. A pen in my day-timer tagged us on the way home, so they had to go through our carry-on and investigate Maya’s dangerous looking DS. I mean, none of this is tragic, and everyone was polite, but it makes for a long day when you’re feeling like crap anyway, and wondering if you’ll make it through without someone hurling.

Luckily, the flight was uneventful, and we are finally safely home, and feeling much, much better.

The highpoints of the vacation? Seeing family, meeting my beautiful new nephew, seeing how much my other nieces and nephews have grown and changed, cooking Christmas dinner with my sister, that kind of stuff. A lovely dusting of snow on Christmas day, a rare occurance in Portland, and the first time Maya has seen snow fall from the sky, so that was kind of magical.

The lowpoints? Illness and cancelled plans.

Overall, I felt badly for my dad and step mom, who put a lot of work into putting together this family reunion vacation/Christmas, and spent a lot of money to get us up there. But they’re feeling better now as well, and we thankfully were able to all get together on Christmas day, and again on the 26th for an early birthday party for moi. 🙂