He'll throw up! We'll all throw up! It'll be anarchy!

It was bound to happen at some point, and happen it did. These words stand before you  as my personal representative to testify that this particular happening did indeed happen. It occurred, even. You are about to stop reading because I’m not getting to the point. Or maybe you’re not interested. Or maybe your boss just walked by and caught you on DadCentric yet again.

You know how in Battlestar Galactica -- and yes, this will contain a bit of spoilage, but only from season 1 which, if you haven’t watched yet, well then I can’t help you -- but you remember how basically the entire government was wiped out in a massive nuclear attack carried out by self-righteous monotheistic robots, which left the human race with almost no governance until it was determined that some mid-level administrator was next in line to take over the presidency, and even then there was only the barest of bare bones leadership structures in place to lead the remains of the human race through the galaxy with no tangible future in sight?

Well that’s basically what happened at my house last weekend.

True, there were no robots, religious or otherwise, and there were no nuclear weapons. But there was a significant breakdown in the household command structure brought about by the introduction of an illness with enough firepower to render said command structure bedridden and unable to do anything with food other than transform it into vomit. It started Sunday afternoon with me puking up my lunch.

“Oh look, an olive.”

From there, the attacks continued in my wife’s digestive system. We went to bed thinking that we had seen the worst of it, but were woken up in the middle of the night by a screaming vomiting three year old. Against protests most vehement, we bathed him and washed all the puke out of his hair and brought him to bed with us where he puked again. After changing the sheets and waiting a good long while for him to get the rest of it out, he -- yep, you guessed it, because you are experienced and educated and you can accurately predict outcomes when they are presented to you in a predictable format such as this, as evidenced by your readership here at DadCentric.

In the midst of all this, the baby also woke up a few times. He normally sleeps through the night, but because he knew that on this particular night we were having a particularly hard time, he decided he wanted in on the action. What is it with me always assuming vindictive motives behind everything? 

Monday morning, my wife and I awoke much sicker than we had been the night before. Sick as dogs we were, the sick kind of dogs that haven’t enough strength or dignity to muster up even a single bark for those asshole cats that make snide remarks at them from the safety of the top of the fence. Neither of us were in any shape to go to work, and we decided to keep the boys home too, just in case. We lay in bed next to each other, our stomachs churning and cramping, the pain pinning us to the mattress, but the cries of the baby demanding that one of us find the strength to go to him. The three year old snoozing soundly between us popped his enormous brown eyes wide open, ready to face the day. As sick as he had been the night before, he seemed to be back in fighting shape now, his strength returned to full capacity. And the baby? Not a hint of sickness about him. 

The health of our children, it should go without saying, is something for my wife and I to be thankful for, and we are. But two sick parents attempting to watch over two high energy children is not a scenario that immediately conjures up a sense of gratitude. Like so many things, that feeling comes later with the onset of retrospect. Throughout the day, the only evidence that the eldest child had been sick at all was his refusal to eat anything other than graham crackers, but even without the aid of nourishment, his speed never diminished, his urge to play never faltered, his pleas for us to join him never decreased in volume or intensity. The baby’s powers of destructiveness and his ingenuity for getting into things that we never dreamed were get-into-able were in top form. And the dogs? No help at all, neither of them. My wife and I remained in bed as much as possible, getting up whenever screams beckoned or whenever things got too quiet to mean that anything of quality was afoot.

Somewhere in there, I think I managed to pick up a small bit of wisdom, both about parenting and about human nature in general. Empathy, that whole feeling for others thing, being able to imagine yourself in their moccasins -- it’s not necessarily automatic. We may be born with the capacity for it, but it has to be encouraged, nourished, demonstrated, taught, re-enforced, pushed, and pimped. Because throughout the day, the boys never quite seemed to catch on that the powers of the parental command structure had been in any way compromised. I mean that not as a testament to our ability to power through the suffering, but as a statement of fact. The boys just didn’t get that their folks were down for the count. Of course I didn’t expect the baby to comprehend, but I found myself a bit surprised that my three year old didn’t get it, especially since he’s demonstrated empathy before. The sight of him plopping down on my wife’s nauseous stomach as she lay aching in bed made it clear that he just wasn’t quite catching on.

Still, it passed quickly and we all managed to make it through. None of our toilets or bedsheets have had to eat any vomit in about 60 hours, knock on Macbook. Oddly enough, it was nice to be back at work on Tuesday.