What a Life!

Well, Steve went back to work yesterday afternoon. I think the pain of things piling up on his desk was greater than the pain he was feeling from being sick. He still was hardly eating anything I fixed for him, so you know the pain of things piling up on his desk had to be pretty bad.

As for Ben, well… Tuesday evening he had quite an appetite, and as I reported, he was acting like his evil self all day Tuesday while Steve and I could hardly move (which poses the question of whether he was being bad because he was feeling better or because we weren’t disciplining him due to our inability to get up off the couch?). Yesterday morning I fed him breakfast, but he only ate half of his usual first course. I could tell he was dehydrated because his little eyes were dark and his lips were chapped, but I had a hard time getting him to drink.

In the afternoon, the farting began. Let me just say, being sick myself was quite miserable. But smelling Ben’s farts was almost worse. Oh my goodness! He had a little bit of diarhea, but it was mostly farts into clean pants (trust me, I was checking often).

Then came the real diarhea. I’m telling you, I’ve heard parents talk about those cloth diapers where the poop was so gross the threw away the diaper instead of cleaning it even though they paid $20 for that single diaper (that price being the high end for diapers – ours only cost me $2.50 to $5 each). I rinsed that one out in the toilet…which caused me to gag but I didn’t quite barf. Then I took it downstairs and put it in the load of dirty diapers I had just started. Had someone else changed that diaper, they would have been immediately pardoned had they just thrown it away.

Needless to say, I put Ben in the tub when I took that diaper off. I filled the tub with warm water, washed him from head to toe (he’d gotten poop on his clothes and the rug when I undressed him so everything else got washed too). Then I drained the water and re-filled the tub and let him play for a bit. When he got out, I put his jammies on even though it was only shortly after five o’clock.

Oh, and let me add a little drama to the story (in case there isn’t enough for you already). I was watching Oprah yesterday. In our area, it comes on twice – at three o’clock on one station and at four o’clock on another. I was watching the three o’clock showing and it was about classes in America and how people make assumptions and treat people in the upper class versus middle or lower class. Warren Buffet is I think the second richest person in the U.S. and he happens to live in Omaha. His granddaughter was on the show, and when it originally showed, everyone was talking about it. I, however, had missed it so I was watching so I could see the clip.

So I’m watching the show and Oprah does the tag that they’re going to be talking with Warren Buffet’s granddaughter in the next segment, they go to commercial break and in cuts Katie Couric with special coverage of President Gerald Ford’s funeral.

Now I don’t mean any disrespect or anything. I watched the coverage of the entire funeral and processions Tuesday morning, from when they moved the casket out of the Capitol Building to when the plane took off for Michigan. I’ve heard the Ruffles and Flourishes, Hail to the Chief, the 21-Gun Salute with big army cannons, and watched them take the casket in and out of the hearse more than once. And they were interrupting Oprah to do it again.

So I noted the time – 3:43 – and hoped that they would be back to regular programing by the time 4:43 rolled around and I could catch that segment as part of the second showing.

I don’t know if you’ve figured out where I’m going with this yet, but it was around 4:00 that Ben started the stinky farting and around 4:40 that he had the big poopy diaper. The tv was still on, but I can’t say I saw much of the segment the second time either. So I still don’t know what all the buzz was about. And I really wanted to know. Oh well. Maybe they’ll do a re-run of that show again sometime.