5elementknitr: Y is for Yack

GAH! I can't believe it's been over a month since I last posted! Looks like Alphabet Soup really IS going to take all year this time. I've had in mind what I was going to post for Y and for Z for over 3 months now! There's been additions to Y so it's pretty long. I'm posting this today and Z tomorrow and then I have a LOT of other things I want to talk about. But for now....

This post actually started on...

Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - I get a call from the school nurse at 9am that D2 has thrown up in the gym.

D2 got sick "7 times" when he had the bug. He even threw up in Dave's truck (in a plastic bag the smart school nurse gave him) after Dave picked him up from school. The funny thing is, D2 threw up BEFORE school and told Dave about it. Dave asked how he felt and he said fine, so Dave sent him off to school. If you've been here awhile, you know that D2 has a puking problem. Not so much anymore, he's pretty much grown out of it, but that kid used to puke ALL the time. Got a little cough, D2? Blech. Is it Tuesday, D2? Blech. So it was no big deal.

This time, he really did have a stomach bug and he counted how many times he puked from 8a until I came home at 2:30p. But by that evening, he was fine and running around like his usual crazy little self.

That was Tuesday.

Thursday, I barely made it home from school. I had a nauseous feeling all day and once I got home it started. It was a tsunami and I haven't had a stomach flu in, literally, 30 years. I thought I was going to die. I emptied my stomach and then I emptied my liver, and after that, I heaved so much and so hard that my stomach AND my back hurt.

I made the mistake of trying to eat a saltine cracker and it flipped me off as it came back out. Salty little bastard.

My illness lasted a bit longer then D2's. I was down for the count all weekend. It was right before my break for school and if you read the last post, you'll remember I had all these really productive plans. Didn't quite work out that way.

When September ended, I felt I was being gas-lighted. I never get sick, you see, and I spent most of September and half of October just knocked the fuck out with illness. I had a nasty cold. I got that damn stomach mess. Then I got T's cough. It lasted, like, 100 days. Then Dave got that cough and he's STILL getting rid of it!

My break was spent in bed. Watched a ton of movies, though! Lots of fluff, so I don't remember too many of them. Eat, Love, Pray was very good. Buitiful - not misspelled, it's a foreign flick starring Javier Bardem - deadly boring but at least it was long and depressing. And subtitled. Arthur - the new one with Russell Brand - total mindless fluff but mildly entertaining. The Warrior's Way - LOVED this one!

All these movies, Dave wouldn't watch with me. He was a champ with the stomach flu thing (mine, happily it passed him by without even a glance). He made me tea and soup and went to the store for ginger ale. Later (much later - 10p), went to the all night pharmacy to see if there was any anti nausea med's he could get me (Alka Seltzer really helped!). He even asked the pharmacist if I should go to the hospital (he hates talking to strangers, he barely likes talking to people he knows!) - she told him if I could keep water down, I'd be fine. He did all these things, but he wouldn't watch movies with me. Weird.

Anyway, I watched the first five minutes of The Warrior's Way and told Dave to come watch with me. He said he was watching a football game. I said for him to watch the first five and if he liked it, we could watch it later; if he didn't like it, I'd watch by myself. He saw the first five and ditched the football game he was watching!

It's very stylized (like Sin City or 300), but not all of it. It's a kung fu western movie and the main character is very quiet but there's quite a lot of poignant moments and also a lot of funny bits. I loved it and so did Dave! It's rated R and we couldn't figure out why (what little blood there is was in that stylized/animated category) until the final fight, then we were all..... ah, yes, I see.

So my week off from school was a wash.

But!

Dave thought with all the school and work (for him and for me) and all the illness in our house, we needed a break. So....

We stayed at the Wyndham Grand Desert Condo's - 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, with kitchen, 4 nights - $280! Dave is the KING of finding great deals online. He also figured out it would be cheaper to road trip (11 hours) then to fly all four of us out there. Can anyone say..... knitting time?

We left after I got off work on Sat. and so we spent the night in a hotel in Utah. On the way, we stopped at a really great restaurant who's name I can't remember. It was overlooking a river and there was a pathway down to the river. The kids went to look at it while we waited for our food. Dave went with them first, then I hung out with them a bit. There was a wall with their shadows on it and you could see the sand they were playing with. So we started throwing sand and dropping it and doing a bunch of other silly things to see the cool shadows! Then we went to eat.

D2 ordered a corndog and ate it like corn on the cob so he mostly ate the batter part. He ate about half the hot dog part and we were teasing him about not throwing up. He's had issues with hot dogs in the past.

After dinner, we got in the car and drove the rest of the way to the hotel in Utah. Halfway there, D2 says, "I don't feel so good." and covers his mouth. I was reaching for a plastic bag when he let loose. And that little rat didn't puke by his door. No..... he puked in the middle of the van. All over the bag of spilled library books and library DVDs. He hit the side of my knitting basket but none of it made it inside or I really would have had to kill him.

It was actually a good thing he puked in the car though. If he hadn't, we would NEVER have known we were a good 30 minutes away from the nearest exit!

sigh.

After he let go, he felt fine and popped his earbuds back in and continued to watch his movie like nothing happened. Nice. I got a serious case of the giggles after he puked. It made Dave even madder but I couldn't help it. I just kept thinking that ten minutes earlier I'd commented on the skunk smell on the highway. What made it so funny for me was that all I could think of boiled down to, "Well, can't smell the skunk anymore!"

Notwishtanding the one pukey episode, we had a blast! Dave and I went to 2 timeshare presentations and got $150 in food vouchers at a bunch of different restaurants on the strip, tickets to two different shows for all four of us, a $50 visa card and a bunch of other things! The food vouchers pretty much paid for our food for the trip!

We used the $50 visa card to see the sharks and touch the stingrays at Mandalay Bay...

We saw showgirls....

One of the shows we got tickets for was the magician Nathan Burton. He's the guy who won the first America's Got Talent and he was an excellent illusionist. We had really great seats, too!

We took the kids to see the fountains at the Bellagio and went in to see the artwork. I have this picture of the first time Dave and I went to Vegas together (1999ish) - we are on the big staircase inside the Bellagio and the Van Gogh painting is at the top of the stairs behind us. Not only do they no longer have that Van Gogh, they no longer even have that huge staircase! And the art gallery they do have is $25 per person. It would've been free for the boys but Dave wouldn't let me send them in alone.

They had another gallery featuring the sculptures of a man who uses Cirque de sol performers as models. It was Trevor's idea to see if we could mimic all the twisted body shapes....