If You See Me Tomorrow, You Better Have a Starbucks Chai For Me.

This is how it all started...

A dress from Costco featuring triplet girls. Even though it isn't our style per se, it IS triplet girls and looks like 2 identical and a fraternal.  It would basically be a sin against nature for us to not have these dresses.   In fact the fabulous ladies from my GGG (girl girl girl- no porn intent) triplet group are all going gaga and picking them up to mail to those who don't live by Costco.  One especially brave soul had to call her local Costco and ask them to set aside like 30 dresses in various sizes for her to pick up.

The plan was to meet some friends at Paradise Valley Mall and then later on meet K-dog (my gimp of a mother) who has a Costco card, and go get these bad boys. The first hour and a half was pretty normal. The kids wouldn't play at the play land and just wanted to hold me but honestly that's been the case for the last month so it seemed normal. About noon we all headed to the food court. K-dog met us there and we got the kids some fries and chicken. We took up a huge table in the middle of the place with our 7 kids and 4 adults. Everyone got themselves and their brood situated and started eating.

Then, out of nowhere Annecy starts vomiting EVERYWHERE. I bolt outta my chair and go try and hold her already saturated dress under her. It was an exercise in futility, given the volume. Well mid-barf I hear my mom say "JENN" with that particular tone that says it's important. I look to the chair to my left and Marie-Pierre is now also vomiting all over the food court. Luckily I have basically the greatest friends ever and they just watched and kept eating. No problem. The other patrons of this food court establishment, however, were not as non-plussed. Jerks, as if I ruined their lunch or something! Oh, wait...

At some point they stopped vomiting and all the adults were running around getting napkins, keeping other kids out of the puke etc. I took off their dresses and got them all cleaned up and the area around us as clean as I could. I left them there, naked, while I ran to Childrens Place to at least get them t-shirts. Got back, put a T-shirt (no pants mind you) on Marie-Pierre, turned and put a shirt on Annecy when I hear K-dog calling my name again and coming toward me. Marie had gone to mingle with other diners and there was now a small river of the white-diarrhea-of-death rolling down her pants-less legs in the middle of the food court. ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW?! If this mall hadn't already decided to ban us I am sure they have now. There are probably very large signs with our pictures under a big NO symbol.

After cleaning up my diarrhea kid we high-tailed it outta there. The thing is, I HADN'T GOTTEN THE DRESSES YET!!!! So me, my gimpy mother and my children, 2 of whom HAVE NO PANTS ON, walked over to Costco to find the dresses. Good news is that we found them. Bad news is they were in piles in absolutely NO order and we had to dig through literally every single dress on the table to find the right size. We got the last 2Ts they had. We thought we were pretty awesome until we started to walk away and a VERY GRUMPY worker came up right behind us and started folding the clothes on the tornado-hit table that we had just unfolded. I tried to apologize and told her we were just trying to find the right sizes. She was not amused. So we hung our heads in shame and began to slink away when, at that perfect moment, Marie-Pierre and Eloise each grab an entire stack of clothes from another table and pull them all to the ground. At that point we didn't slink away, we ran as fast as we could, even with no pants on.

It was a triple check day:

Ruin dozens of people's lunch with your bodily functions- check

Piss of workers at Costco- check

Prove how white trash you are by not wearing pants in public- check.


(Does it worry anyone else that all of my most exhilarating days include sick and poop?)


Epilogue:
While preparing this post for publish Annecy was in her room crying.  I finally went to get her and was immediately puked all over.  Luckily she missed her own clothes but in the process managed to wake up Eloisie Lemon Sqeezy and they are now out laying on the couches. So...

IF YOU SEE ME TOMORROW, YOU BETTER HAVE A STARBUCKS CHAI FOR ME!

And Then God Laughed and Laughed and Laughed

This is how I argued it to Eric (presiding judge in this house)-

"She is two years old, she goes in there with her iphone and we don't hear a lot of freaking out, maybe some grumbling a little while later. She NEVER tries to climb out or anything. Honestly, I think she will just stay in there and wait for us to come get her when she gets up. I just want to test the waters. It would be cute if she slept in the toddler bed."

I was so so so wrong. I have rarely been more wrong than I was here. There will probably be urban myths about my wrongness for generations to come.

There were a couple of warning signs that really should have made me think to myself, "STOP! Stop this madness!! Reverse course! Reverse course, good madame!!"

Firstly, the toddler conversion of their cribs is WAAAAY too high for a toddler bed. In order for the conversion to fit securely the mattress must be in the middle position, not the lowest. So when the mattress is in place, the top of the mattress is level with her neck. That's way too freakin' high for a toddler bed. I did second guess this but I thought, "Heck, she doesn't move hardly at all while she sleeps so its HIGHLY UNLIKELY she would fall out." Mmhmm. Hear that? That's God laughing at me.

The second clear warning sign was nap time. Annecy has some "special" (read ridiculous) sleep phases. For a month or more she will sleep pretty normally. Go to bed with very little crying, sleep through the night etc. However, such bliss always ends and she reverts into a phase where she doesn't sleep. She can't fall asleep, she gets herself so worked up in her crib that she pukes all over and eventually all hope is lost, she stays up and falls asleep with Eric and/or myself at like 10 or 11. If she goes back in her own bed she wakes up 72,882,727 times. She doesn't nap. She does this because she is a reincarnation of Rosemary's baby, meant to torture all those living with her. Anyway, one of the signs of these phases is how she acts at nap time and on this particular day she made it clear at nap time that she was going into one of these non-sleep phases. My toddler bed transition could not be at a worse moment. Did I take the hint? Nope. Of course not. I convinced myself it would be fine. (Yep, still laughing.)

So, I tried it anyway...
It started off pretty well actually. We put her to bed, she had her iphone, she didn't cry or anything. I went back to work, plugging away for the man. Eric was in the living room watching TV. Then, about 30 min after we put her down, I hear a little whine and a BAM followed by that crazy panic crying. I fly in there (on my broomstick of course) and, just as you previously predicted, she had fallen out of the Mt Everest of toddler beds. She was not hurt at all but obviously it scared the ever-living crap out of her. So, Eric took her in the living room while I finished work. About 10:30 I was done and came out and took her to bed. I put her mattress on the floor and layed her down on top of it and layed beside her. She seemed fine so I got up to go, which made the toddler mattress move like a catapult, which started the waterworks. I walked out anyway and about 3 min later I see this...

Sneaking out, not sneaking really because she's bawling.

Disappears behind the wall but there's her blankie trailing behind her

WAAAHHH!!  MOOOOMMMM!

Hahaha. Yeah. By this time she was so upset at the prospect of going to bed that she is flipping out. I told her I'd lay by her until she falls asleep and I got a pillow and blanket which I put on the floor NEXT TO HER MATTRESS.

Then I made the fatal mistake.

I set a bawling toddler on the mattress. The crying turned into panicked shrieks and clawing her way off the bed. I pulled her to my lap and that's where the vomiting began. When you are two and you cry REALLY REALLY hard, you puke. And she kept puking...and puking and puking. Since I'm AMAZING, I made her shirt into a bowl and caught a solid 80% of it. It was awesome. Well, it was awesome until Eric and I tried moving her into the bathroom to clean up. Then it leaked, quickly and efficiently leaving a veritable river of vomit from the bedroom to the bathroom. I tossed her in the tub and Eric cleaned up the floor/carpet/blankets/etc. By this time it was about 11:10. I put new pajamas on, brushed her teeth, gave her a drink and gave up. She finally fell asleep about 11:30 in my bed, giving me approximately 6 1/2 inches of space to sleep.  Don't worry Fenway got at least two feet.

First chance I got the next day I put her crib back together and vowed to keep them all in cribs til they are in at least first grade.

And hopefully tonight goes better. Seriously, I need hope that tonight will go better.