Fun Night At The Cootie House

And by Cootie I mean COOTIES. As in PUKE COOTIES. :puke:

Mr. Russell let me leave an hour early from work to come home and take care of the kiddies. I arrived home and upon opening the door was assaulted with stale stank air in the living. And absolutely nightmare. CootieBoy was nearly passed out on his daddy’s lap, and CootieGirl was morose and devoid of energy on the sofa. Apparently CootieBoy had thrown up just before I got home, so I missed that.

But CootieGirl didn’t let me down – throwing up three times during the evening. When I got home I ran upstairs and grabbed the mattress liner sheets that have plastic on the bottom. I put on under CootieGirl on the sofa, and just in time – about two minutes later she was vomiting all over it. I took her upstairs and cleaned her up and put her in a fresh shirt. I laid out the other mattress liner sheet on the other sofa where she laid for about 45 minutes before throwing up again. Once again we headed up stairs for some cleaning up and a fresh shirt. At that point Denis got home from his trek to the grocery store (he, too, noted the nasty smell in our house upon arriving home).

After feeding CootieBoy a banana (for which he was very happy since he hadn’t taken any other food all day) I put him down and he quickly passed out. CootieGirl stayed up, eating two popsicles and throwing up the green one about 30 minutes later. Fortunately she gave us warning – she had been sitting in Denis’ lap watching TV and suddenly lurched forward with a groan. A laundry basket was nearby and I grabbed a rug from it and threw it on the floor in front of her just as she leaned forward and let go. Once she was done I tossed the rug immediately into the washing machine (which ran all night long and is STILL running as I type this).

She was done for the night – she didn’t throw up again and at about 8:30 p.m. we put her to bed, asleep on a Thomas the Tank Engine sleeping bag since that was the only clean “bed” item left in the house at that point.

To try and get rid of the stench I threw two of the couch’s cushion covers in the washer, but even that didn’t help. We’re going to rent a steam cleaner and do all the rugs and carpets in the whole house. They are due to be done again anyway, but the fact that the kids have christened the whole house with their sickness makes it all the more timely. We’re going to try and do it before my mom comes this weekend.

As of 11:22 p.m. the kids have remained asleep and as far as I know have NOT thrown up in their beds. Hopefully they’ll make it through the night, although they’ll need to stay home from daycare again tomorrow just to make sure. Our daycare provider called Denis today to tell him that another kid at school had the same virus, so chances are high that they caught it from daycare on Thursday or Friday. Which means we may have passed it on to Denis’ family, which also means CootieBoy may have passed it on to people at church who handled him on Sunday morning.

*sigh*