Winning. (Everyone Else is Saying It.)

I have tried to post yesterday's blog a billion times. For some reason, it won't let me. It's only taken me ten days, I think, to get back to blogging. Once again, I am way off the beam.

I suppose it must be this baby in my belly that has me drawn to do other things. For a couple of months it had me drawn to the bathroom. The smell of coffee or the kids soap was enough to turn me an even more horrible shade of green than I already was--24/7 nausea. It was like having the stomach flu, all day, every day, for weeks, no months, at a time.

It passed. Phew.

My much-needed, much-anticipated mommy's night away in Columbia with my ole BFF started as magically as one might hope. Turns out our Inn was right in the hub of Gamecock collegiate frivolity. We lunched at a hip coffee/cafe, complained about the high price of a sandwich, after all, we were the oldest people in the joint, and elderly folk complain about such things, right? We checked into our room at the Inn and promptly checked into our pajama pants. We did manage to make it back out into the world ever-so-briefly for a trip to the Food Lion, conveniently located behind the Inn. We treated ourselves to two pints of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia, kept cold in our loaded with ice from the Inn ice machine sink.

A local Chinese restaurant was kind enough to let us stay in our pajama pants for the rest of the evening. They delivered two obscenely large helpings of Bean Curd Family Style and soup. It was heavy on the ginger and garlic. In other words, it was perfect, especially while being consumed on two giant Queen sized beds and no one asking us to get up and get a single thing. No one complaining or screeching or bickering. Nothing. Well, not nothing. We did have endless episodes of Toddlers and Tiaras, Sex and the City, and Say Yes! to the Dress. It was perfect. Almost perfect.

Around 1:30am, I woke up cold. Then hot. Then freezing. And the aching. Bone-crushing aching. And the headache. And the cough. I knew what it was. I've had it before, but I was having a mom's night away. I was just out of the first trimester misery. I. WAS. NOT. SICK. AND IT WAS NOT NOT NOT the F-L-U.

So I drifted in and out of nightmares only to find myself awakened by what was not a bad dream about being twenty years old and drunk as a skunk in a hotel room, but was actually a group of KIDS next door, drunk as skunks, smoking like chimneys, and hooting and hollering like they were NOT in an Inn, and certainly not next door to two moms who just wanted twenty-fours of PEACE and QUIET.

We immediately went into what's that racket?/kids these days mode. It took multiple visits from the front desk and one final visit from a police officer to get them to do what most people really need to do at 3:30am--Go to Bed.

The following day is an unfortunate blur. I do remember the lovely in-room continental breakfast of coffee, bagels, and yogurt parfaits, but the rest of it is nothing more than a hazy, sickened trip home. I don't even remember the drive. All I know is it was official shortly after I got home: I was sick, and it was the flu.

It passed. Phew.