Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Flashback Friday... four days late

Friends of ours went on Thursday night to the Capitol Lights in the Park, where you drive around in Washington Park and look at all the light displays that are set up for the holiday season. Flashing lights, twinkling arches, Rudolph displays: it's all there and really fun. You can tune the radio to Christmas songs while you drive and it makes a real Holiday Memory For The Kids. This reminded me of the first time the Libutti Family went to this great event, back in 2003-ish.
Dan, Michaela and I loaded into my parents' minivan and the five of us started cruising through. The cars go single file through the display and during the busy times, you really just creep along, with lots of stop-and-go kind of movement. We were about 5 minutes into this Holiday Memory when we spied a car, with its flashers on, broken down on the side of the road in the park. In a VERY un-Christian type manner, I said, "Wow! It sucks to be them!!! They're going to have to stay there until the display is done for the night because no help can get to them. Hahaha!"
(Can you see the foreshadowing going on here??)
A few minutes later, Michaela, who is about 2 and a half at this time, says to me, "Mommy, I don't like those lights." and I peek out her side of the window to see a Frosty display that looks like he's waving. As I wrack my brain to figure out what a two year old's objection to this would be, I hear Michaela do this weird coughing noise. I look over at her and am horrified to see she has puked up something red all over herself. At first I panicked- the kind of panic you only feel a few times as a parent that makes your heart literally stop- because I thought she was coughing and puking up blood. This is not good.
Then the smell of her puke wafts over to me and I realize it's not blood. Dan and I had gone grocery shopping earlier in the day and she had broken into a container of cut up cantaloupe while we were distracted putting the groceries away and eaten ALOT of it. And she chased that down with a few Twizzlers. ALOT of Twizzlers. And that was what I was smelling.
Once I calmed down, I try to get her cleaned up, but the worst was not over. For the next 15 minutes or so, she puked three or four more times. At the end, she was puking into my cupped hands and my dad would open the sliding door of the van and I would try to fling the puke out. We had no diaper bag, just a few old towels in the car to clean things up with. Argh. It was just a nightmare. And guess what? It sucked to be us because there was no way to leave the line of cars and get out of the park. We had to keep crawling along, stopping and starting, catching and flinging.
We skipped the Capitol Lights in the Park the following year but made a triumphant return, puke-free, two years ago.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Tails-I remember this like it was this afternoon! ONLY YOU could have not screamed thinking it was blood! You are SO calm. Poor M but she does not remember it all so I guess we were more traumatized than she was. AH-children-they will KILL you. I love you all! Mommy