Monday’s Mindful Tip: The Vomit Bucket List

I can cross Spring Break with 5 vomiting Kids off my bucket list now.

I admit, mindfulness is being challenged today. I am visiting my sister’s home with my three children and two of my nieces. All 5 children have a case of the stomach flu–vomiting every 15 minutes to half an hour all night/day long. Our first 2 cases seem to have turned the corner and this gives us all hope.

How to stay calm when my duties include countless vomit bucket empties and cleanups with very little sleep? For me, it is acceptance. Accepting this is where I am at this time in my life. We must stay put until everyone is travel ready, perhaps another day or two? Of course, one sometimes dwells on past hopes for this trip–the fun activities Auntie had kindly planned for us that we cannot do. But the reality is one of illness, thus, we all must focus on the return to health and keeping mindful during this process. At least we got in one good day of all of us feeling fit and healthy! All the fun things we cannot do, we will save them for the summer (except the ski day at WhiteWater) and I’ll bring my girls back for a week in July. Though, I must say, this is an especially ironic bug to befall us on this vacation as my sister is one of the most accomplished and gifted hobby-chefs in the world.

As I type this I am interrupted with calls from upstairs for “Mom!”–back from another bucket empty…

Mindfulness for me will be finishing my freelance article due tomorrow, walking around the neighborhood, and doing a little taking-stalk of my life direction. A few things have recently happened that force me to reevaluate my goals and plans for the next year. I have had a plethora of stresses lately. Thus, this time of nurse-maiding will give me a little bit of time to look at my life from all sides and perhaps come to some exciting realizations and new goals.

I am fighting the bug and don’t feel like my usual energetic self. But I am strong so I plan to fight and take it physically easy (no serious exercise) as I struggle with the exhaustion and general feeling of malaise.

Our hosts have been very gracious and must attempt to go about their busy hosting and work lives despite the Chaos. My sister is very patient with children and has the wonderful ability of remaining happy and focused in their presence even if ten different things are happening at once. The most devastating thing about the illness for my youngest daughter (Pip) has been missing out on today’s work day at the Vet Clinic–she and her cousin were going to work side by side with my sister in her vet practice. Pip and her cousin even assured Auntie T that  they would be able to handle all the spay/neuter surgeries themselves if Auntie fell ill too.

Somehow, it seems, the universe took a sharp turn and I have ended up spending hours in my nephew’s bedroom, watching over the patients in his bed, while he is busy living his life at University back in my Okanagan home city!  We’ve switched places. Perhaps I can learn something from reading all of the teenage boy posters on his walls…maybe there’s a universal message in all of this other than the obvious: go with the flow girl.