The 1 Year Anniversary

We’ve had a terrible weekend, here.

To start with, the kid has gastro. Vomiting, crankiness, awful smells and lots of reruns of Sid the Science kid replaced our weekend plans to enjoy the beautiful weather and go skiing with Rob’s parents.

Rob, meanwhile, decided to pick this weekend to install our brand new dishwasher. Six hours and one trip to town (for a missing part) later, our kitchen was in mass disarray, but he was finally done. The last thing we had to do was peel off the protective coating from the stainless steel exterior. And what did we find? A HUGE dent. It reminds me of those mirrors in the fun houses at the Ex. If we weren’t so annoyed (or distracted by another barf episode) we could have laughed at our contorted reflections in it. We didn’t.

Rob called Sears but apparently they could not replace our BRAND NEW dishwasher because we hadn’t called within the first 24 hours.

To make himself feel better about things, Rob then decided to change one of the burnt out light bulbs in our 17-foot ceiling. To do this, he had purchased a long pole like contraption with a suction cup on the end. He got it up there and on the light bulb OK, but in the process of pulling it off, ripped the light bulb, socket and ceiling down with it.

As pieces of light bulb and ceiling fell around us, Toby burst into tears while Rob finally “released” his anger. I just sat there and stared at the hole in our ceiling.

IN case you thought it couldn’t get any worse, not two hours later, Rob and I came down with Toby’s flu bug. Rob had it worse than I did – simultaneously erupting from both ends as his stomach cramped and released…. I wasn’t sure if my own nausea came from watching him or from a milder version of the bug.

At the pinnacle of our misery, Rob turned to me and with a weakened moan said, “I can’t believe our luck…could things GET any worse??”

Yes, they could.

January 10^th is an anniversary I hate to remember- -but do. It was this day last year that Toby fought for his life while we helplessly looked on. That his struggling lungs finally gave out and ventilators and tubes and central lines were inserted into his little body to give him a chance. That the Sick Kids crew spent 6 hours up in Orillia stabilizing him enough for the ride down. That we got those 3 sickening phone calls on the way to sick kids saying the ambulance had had to pull over to “restabilize”. That we were given a key to the room that only the parents of the sickest ICU kids at Sick Kids Hospital were granted access to. That they wouldn’t let us see him for 3 excruciating hours while countless doctors, nurses and RTs took over.

It was a year ago today that he made it.

If only I’d had a crystal ball this time last year, I could have seen us one year later…A DENT in a dishwasher? A hole in the ceiling? The 24-hour flu? A weekend cooped up in the house with the two people I love the most…the normalcy of all of it would have had my sobbing with relief.

By bedtime tonight, my two boys were finally well enough to muster up the appetite for some dry toast. As we sat around the kitchen counter, surrounded by ginger ale, dishwasher-installation manuals, barf buckets and pieces of our ceiling, Toby very sweetly asked that we say grace. We bowed our heads and said with gratitude, “Thank you for our Toby. And Thank you for our incredible luck.”