Adventures of a Saturday Night

We look back at this past Saturday night as one of our funniest nights....post children, so we thought we would share these laughs with our faithful blog viewers!

We cancelled our babysitter for the evening, which in retrospect was a tremendous blessing for us and our sweet babysitter. We decided instead to do an "in house" date night. We do these about once a month. We'll go to Wegmans and buy something we normally wouldn't buy in our weekly shopping and a bottle of wine. After we put the kids down we cook together and then enjoy our meal and either a movie a game of Yahtzee or scrabble. So for this Saturday night we bought some flank steak and marinated it all day and we planned to make a yummy balsamic steak salad with a bottle of Merlot - YUM.

So about 6PM we fed the children. I boiled up some Trader Joe's pesto gnocchi. Little man inhaled them as usual, but our princess was struggling with them. She kept telling us they were spicy. She tends to sometimes be a little dramatic, by the way we have no idea where this comes from, so we dismissed it. We made her finish the gnocchi and she soon started complaining her stomach hurt. I ran to the gnocchi packaging and almost fell over - I can't believe what I've done. Our daughter reminds us that she is allergic to nuts about 10 times a day. In fact, after we made her finish the gnocchi, I gave her a cookie left over from bible study the night before and she said "Are there nuts in here"? I said "No sweetie, you never have to worry about Mama giving you something with nuts". HA. So apparently Trader Joe's makes their pesto gnocchi with cashews - which is the EXACT nut that she is allergic to. She has had pesto in the past, but pesto made with pine nuts which she is not allergic to. So here we go - this is going to be an interesting night and the guilt was piled on high!

We proceed to take both children up into the bathroom. Little man is in the tub and princess is whaling that her stomach hurts but she doesn't want to "puke" as she says it. About 10 minutes into this, the power goes out. Splendid! So I get little man out of the tub, put jammies on him, while hubby runs around getting candles and flashlights. I lit a few candles upstairs and found another flashlight. About 5 minutes later, the fire alarm goes off. We just figured it was because we lit a few candles upstairs and we also knew our alarms are a bit sensitive. Fire alarms are made for a reason, and unfortunately they were sending us an accurate message that we just decided to ignore. A few minutes later I started to go down the stairs and I clearly smell what the fire alarm was trying to tell us. I start running and yelling hubbies name. A beautiful candle with herbs and flowers molded in the wax around the sides, was in full blown flames in the hallway. The beautiful herbs and flowers had caught on fire. Luckily we tended to this just in time and damage was prevented. WOW - ok what's next?

We put little man in his room to bed and tend to our poor whaling daughter as the stomach pains come in flows. About 45 minutes go by, and after talking to a neighbor pediatric nurse and NOT getting thru to the pediatrician that is on my "not so good list", she says she's tired and wants to go to bed. So perhaps there were just traces of cashews in the pesto and she's not really going to vomit. Last time, when we found out she was allergic to them, it was an immediate response. A few hives formed this time, but nothing like last time. So she climbs into bed about 8:30PM and we go downstairs to make the best of the remainder of our date night in the dark. We started playing Scrabble as we ate our peanut butter sandwiches - not so yum. I sort of had an uneasy feeling about the evening, and was not really into the game. At least this is what I told hubby since I was not having a good Scrabble night - 5-6 vowels at all times. We decided perhaps it was best to call it a night and go to bed early. It was only suppose to be a low of 30, so hopefully we could stay put in the house without heat all night, but you never know, a hotel might be in our future.

We just settled down for a long winters nap when we heard the princess cry. And yes indeed she did vomit. I'm amazed how it was able to touch every comforter, blanket, sheet, pillow, stuffed animal and the chair next to her bed. After an hour of cleaning we get her nestled in bed and she's feeling much better. And the power come back on! We breathe a sigh of relief that we now have heat....almost asleep....and then little man wakes up. Now when little man wakes up, it's a whole different story. One of the characteristics of Fragile X is called Hyperarousal. Some children, him being one of them, have trouble if they wake up in the middle of the night, settling back down. On a scale of 1 to 10, we wake up and at an arousal level of about 1 or 2 and usually settle back down quickly. Jimmo wakes up at level mock 10 and wants to play and yell and play and yell some more. So we go thru our routine when this happens, and a few hours later the entire family is fast asleep for at least a few hours before morning.

Now we look back at this evening and laugh - really - could all that seriously happen in one evening? I think in a few years we'll laugh even more!

And don't look too close at the board.....it was a tough night for Scrabble :0)