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| in this photo you can see the half wall that marked our neighbor's downstairs apartment house (where the boardwalk narrows)...the pink awning and yellow building was a bar frequented by all of the locals |
...it's only been five years since ellie was a baby, but i'd forgotten so much--the projectile spit-up is one memory i'd completely flushed...but after last night's fiesta-o-vomit i'll forever remember why caring for infant twins is like reliving my last year of college when i shared a beach house with four friends, wherein we all proceeded to remain drunk and/or high during the majority of our free time...we had a house bong we named Shaft...and as exercises in team building we made pot butter and flaming dr peppers and snapped ridiculous pictures of ourselves and our house guests which we affixed to a kitchen cabinet called "the wall of shame"...the majority of my time was spent on the boardwalk drinking vodka with our forty-something neighbor or toking...
...you know, the proud days i just can't wait for my kids to emulate...
...it struck me last night as i sat and rocked one baby, then another, that those were the best days of my life, not simply because i miss them ever so much (seriously, everyone should live at the beach at least once, being lulled to sleep by the sounds of the waves) but because they readied me for the madness that has consumed my life in the last month...the delirium from lack of sleep and the insane amount of vomiting that happened last night caused me to thank the universe for the days i spent inebriated--preparing me for parenting twins...
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| our place faced the large green stretch of grass, third in from the lot on the left |
...knox, overcome with a case of sympathetic vomiting, proceeded to make his own contributions once everything was clean again...a couple of hours later they both needed diaper changes and my little man took that opportunity to pee on himself, the bed, and the floor...fifteen years ago a party guest, too drunk to drive home, crashed at the beach house and proceeded to vomit stringy, brown streaks onto my roommate's white comforter...once he'd been cleaned up, and the offending bedding thrown over the balcony, he then peed all over himself...
...last night, anne--smelling her brother's urine--vomited a second time...covering her entire head, filling her right ear, and drenching her arms and the bassinet for a third time...by 3am i'd changed each baby four times, myself once, gone through three bassinet sheets and two blankets, and cleaned both urine and vomit from the floor...then my little ones were hungry again...because, you know, there's nothing like eating to combat vomiting and nausea...what a 3am carne asada burrito and a gallon of horchata did for me in the nineties...
...at 5:30am ellie crashed into our room, eyes closed and mumbling to herself...she'd apparently lost her way back to her own room after visiting the toilet...much like a drunken house guest from those days at the beach, it took an hour of coaxing before i convinced her she was in the wrong place...i finally got her back into her own bed with the promise of a high carb, high sugar breakfast...because nothing is as good as a stack of pancakes after an evening of sleeping in the wrong bed......i could never quite turn off my brain after our drunken beach house nights, which meant it hardly got any rest that year...or it eventually just began twirling and whirling on its own--getting me to campus, to class, then back again without any conscious effort...the way it's cruised on autopilot the last 30 days...
...as i'm writing this it's 7:30am and much like that year i spent drunk and high i'm wide awake, surrounded by snoring people who've stunk up the place...i've even got the coastal waves crashing through the noise machine in the corner of the room...