... and I'm kinda OK with that. Because last night I was too busy just being a dad to sleep. Our son has been fighting some allergies for a few days and the drainage was enough last night that he got sick to his stomach.
Three times
At 2AM
In the upstairs hallway
On the carpet
Right outside the bathroom
This is a very frustrating thing for me, because, also suffering from allergies, I hadn't been sleeping too well before that, and I had plans to wake up early to run. Running on 6 hours of sleep in the pre-dawn darkness when it's cold is not always kind to me, so I really wanted to get those 6 hours of sleep, but I didn't. I had about 3 hours in when I heard a door open upstairs. It's not entirely out of the ordinary for this to happen, because (thank God!) my son is fully capable of waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, wash his hands, and go back to bed all without a fuss. (Why he can't do this as quickly when we're in a hurry to leave for school in the morning is one of those great mysteries of the universe.) I also heard him coughing, which isn't that weird since we've all been coughing this week and waking up never seems to help.
So I simply turned over and tried to find a way to lie down that didn't hurt (I mysteriously injured my back by waking up last week and it's been a lingering problem.) until I heard a curious noise... the sound of someone puking isn't something you hear alot (unless you're in college... or perhaps a grade school teacher) so it always takes me a few seconds to put it together... it's like coughing, but more wet.
My wife is a gifted sleeper. She can sleep through a great many things, and that's a good thing in this case since she's an accomplished puker as well. Just thinking about somebody else eating some bread that's a bit old might just be enough to give her dry heaves. Combining these two superpowers, legend has it that she once puked in the middle of the night and turned over to sleep on the clean side of the better, having never awoken! (Her other great superpower is the ability to tighten the lids on jars beyond her ability to reopen them, but that's not important right now :-) Her magical puking powers mean I'm the one to clean up any puke in the house, lest the puke be magnified by her puking when attempting to deal with it. So it should be evident that if I wanted to have a puke-free bed to sleep in, I needed to quiet down the action upstairs very quickly!
I hustled upstairs just in time to see that our son was pretty much done emptying his stomach onto the hallway, but I rushed him into the bathroom just in case there was any more in there.
I got him cleaned up and in fresh PJ's...gave him a few minutes of wavering on his feet to make sure he was done, and let him go back to bed.
I wondered for a moment at the joy that he'd managed to get out of his room before popping, and then fell into a moment of sorrow that he'd decided to wander into the hall instead of just staying the bathroom. Because the bathroom has a tile floor. The hall has cheap carpet that stains if you look at it funny. And there was a foot-wide swath of puke-colored puke spots spattered over it for several feet. And I was standing in one :-(
I reached around the bathroom doorway to grab some kleenex and got my feet clean enough to walk back downstairs and grab a stack of cleaning towels and the carpet cleaner spray.
I then spend at least half an hour converting the stack of clean towels to a stack of not-so-clean towels and generally being not too happy. Amazing how corn looks exactly the same after being chewed up and digested for half the night. At least our son has finally learned to chew his food... if I didn't know we had burgers for dinner I don't think I would have guessed that's what most of the other stuff was. Somewhere around 3 AM I finally hauled a bag of disgusting downstairs to the kitchen, where I could rinse the chunky disgusting out of the cleaning towels and into the garbage disposal. By 4 AM I had gotten things to a state where I would not want to blow chunks myself when dealing with it later and stumbled back to bed.
Now if I were REALLY a runner, I'd have gotten up again at 5 and gotten my miles in. But today, I'm just a tired dad. And I'm OK with that.
(A sure sign of the coming apocalypse (or at least being really busy) another back-dated blog post, sorry)
Since the great puke incident of November, things have been well. I've logged all my planned miles and am on my second pair of running shoes for the year, with a third planned before the marathon. I have bought running gloves and a running hat and survived sleet, wind, and cold. I have "eaten" Gu on the run and been on runs so long I had to visit some discreet bushes along the side of the road to get rid of the water I would have sweated out in the summer.
This weekend: my first 17-mile run! This will be my first 40-mile week!
Next weekend: a "rest", cutting back to just a 12-mile Saturday run.
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