So the Weekend That Will Never End continues on to today, much to my delight.

It all started Wednesday night, with Frannie and some late-night vomiting. No big deal, I thought. I can handle that. All little kids get sick once and a while, and I heard something is going around.

It has gone on every night since Wednesday, and sometimes in the day, too. It’s always the little whimper followed by the sound a toilet makes when you flush three toothbrushes and a Barbie head down it. Then the torrent of puke. Things that are not nice the second time around: “Craisins,” blueberries, noodles, and cottage cheese. I thought I had completed this list from my binge drinking days, but that was mostly Doritos, Chinese food, and martini olives anyhow.

Frannie was always an A+ puker when she was wee. You could always count on her for some good ralphing after nursing, being picked up, being set down, or being looked at cross-eyed. But that was just breast milk, which usually came up fast enough to be fairly innocuous. Now it’s the real deal.

On Friday night I was trying to gently rock her on the couch, to soothe her after a vigorous round of grocery-blowing. After a few minutes she started whimpering and squirming, and let it all go all over my chest. It is hard to clean up after someone else when you feel your gag reflex kicking in.

And it’s not enough to wipe her mouth and change her clothes, like you can with an older, more talented puker…Frannie barely wakes up, she just lays on her side and lets it rip into her hair. It is almost as hard to get vomit chunks out of hair at three in the morning as it is to get peanut butter out on a good day. I have had to put her in the shower and hose her off every night until she smells okay enough to come to bed with us.

And if she’s taking a break from vomiting, it’s the sound of distant thunder…and then whatever I just fed her is blasting out the other side. I no longer laugh when people use the phrase “diaper gravy.” It’s just the right consistency to adhere all over her bum and up her legs, but liquidy enough to roll out of the diaper and onto my beautiful goddam rug.

As you may have guessed, my house doesn’t smell very good right now. I’ve been eating basically the same flu diet she has, cause nothing smells appetizing at all. It either smells like ass in here, or like buckets of stomach acid. How can a small thirty-pound person make such bad smells?

I was supposed to write a paper this weekend (due tomorrow) and have had no energy to do anything. I should be doing it right now, but I just had to vent and warm-up for graded writing next.

Oh christ if I would’ve known what days of vomiting was all about I would have put my crapping ovaries out of commission with an ice pick and adopted children who were old enough to clean up their own bodily fluids. There has to be nice fourteen-year-olds out there who need a loving home.