I haven't been outside today, and no, it's not because I'm a hermit/vampire who has to avoid the sun lest I burn like parchment.

No, I haven't stepped foot outside because I'm afraid I'll see a swarm of locusts. The end is nigh. In fact, I may get out a piece of cardboard and clang a bell up and down the block yelling, "THE END IS COMING."

Hey someone's got to be the Town Crier.

(You can trust me, I'm a nurse.)

Two weeks ago, I got some sort of stomach bug. At the time, I attributed it to anxiety, because things in Casa de la Vodka have been *ahem* challenging.

Then my daughter started to vomit.

Soon, my house resembled the Great Barf-o-Rama from that movie with the kid from Star Trek.

Frantically, I ran around, bleach in hand, trying to sanitize every possible surface to stop the spread of The Great Plague. Of course, my efforts were futile, but it felt better than sitting around, waiting for the next bout.

It would have been comical if it had been on America's Funniest Home Videos. For me, not so much.

There was not enough vodka (and bleach) in the world to help make those five long days anything besides horrifying.

Well before I had any kids of my own, I figured I'd have four of 'em. I'd always wanted a big family and I assumed that kids were kinda like Pokemon cards: gotta catch 'em all. If you had one, you might as well have fourteen.

Oh, how I laugh when I think back to my pathetic grasp of parenthood.

I ended up with three. Kids, I mean, not Pokemon cards. And it turns out, my reasoning was pretty faulty. Three is a great number (School House Rock calls it the "magic number") for a lot of things, but three is a fucking lot of children. Especially when they're each alternating between vomiting and wailing on the couch about vomiting.

School House Rock should probably rework their "Three Is the Magic Number" song to include a disclaimer about "unless it's kids."

Somehow, someway, we all survived the Great Barf-o-Rama of 2011.

Barely.