Catholic writer Danielle Bean composed a mother’s version of St. Francis of Assisi’s Prayer for Peace during the eye of a storm of childhood stomach-flu:
A MOTHER’S PRAYER OF ST. FRANCIS
(STOMACH FLU VERSION)Lord,
Make me an instrument of Your healing love;
Where there is vomit let me bring Lysol;
Where there are boogers, Kleenex;
Where there is fever, Tylenol;
Where there is boredom, library books;
Where there are chills, warm blankets;
And where there is whininess, Scooby Doo.O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be well-rested as to provide clean sheets,
To be appreciated as to disinfect the house,
To be showered as to give warm baths,
For it is in scrubbing out the bathroom that we are cleansed,
It is in sharing laps that we find comfort,
And it is after resting that we will return
To a normal life.
(Nod to the Curt Jester for the link.)
Hy-larious! I don’t wanna be indelicate, here, but before we had babies nobody told us about running to the bathroom at 3:00am with a big double-handful of baby vomit! Or getting up twice in the same night to strip the sheets off the bed and run them through the wash, finally to end up sleeping on a sheet-less bed. But by then you’re so tired you really, truly don’t care.
Oh, the stories I could tell about spewing orafices! But I won’t. I’ll just say this…that I can’t even deal with my own vomit, so how I have managed to deal with the childrens’ for the last 13 years, I don’t know! (by the grace of God, perhaps?)
I seriously considered never allowing my kids to eat carrot ever again, after I discovered that the reason they threw up little carrot cubes a week after they’d eaten them, was that it took the system at least that long to digest them properly…which means, even when you think you have carrot free children, it may not necessarily be so…but I digress…as usual.
God Bless.