Cough Syrup Cocktails

Got back last night and can't wait to show some pix from the trip, but first I need to vent about my morning from hell. Eli wakes up at 5:30am (clearly still on Wisconsin time) and thrashes around our bed for an hour, then throws a fit when I pour him the cereal he asked for because he's since changed his mind and wants crackers for breakfast. I'm way too tired to deal with this, and thankfully Stephen puts on the Veggie Tales movie we have from Netflix to distract the boys and keep them happy. I climb back in bed to read scriptures... and next thing I know I hear Eli down the hall letting out a satisfied "Aaaaah" like he's just finished a big glass of juice or something. I get up to find him sitting on the floor with two empty bottles of children's cold medicine that had been packed up in my suitcase from the trip. Lovely.

The bottles weren't full; in fact, one was almost gone but the other was at least half full and it was the chest congestion medicine that has some serious active ingredients. Called Poison Control for the first time in my life only to have them ask me twenty times exactly how many ounces he drank, which of course I could only guess. Eventually they told me to get to the ER as fast as I could. Off we went, PJs and all, to our third ER visit of 2008.

Eli was acting normal and happy up until the nurse tried to weigh him and then the screaming began. The kid seriously didn't stop for the next hour. His freakish strength certainly didn't help matters, either, because not only did he thrash and kick the second a doctor or nurse tried to put the heart monitor stickers on his chest or the pulse check on his finger or toe, but if they did by some miracle get it on, not even my arm and leg lock could stop him from ripping them off. So incredibly frustrating. Then they show up with this huge dose of charcoal--that looks just like motor oil and gave me flashbacks to the new James Bond movie I saw the other night--that they want him to ingest, and I'm thinking they've got to be kidding. With two nurses there to help me restrain him, he eventually chokes down enough motor oil to make them happy, even if we all do look like a bunch of chimney sweeps, black grease smeared everywhere. Finally all the crying and sweating starts to wear him down, and ten Primary songs later he falls asleep. The beautiful sound of quiet almost puts me to sleep, too, while Benito is the most patient kid in the world as we sit there and wait for "a full hour of all vitals being monitored" to go by, but when you tack on the time it took to check us in, get our info, calm Eli down, etc. we'd spent over three hours there. Yuck.

The good news is Eli was and still appears to be fine. Blood pressure and heart rate looked normal, which were of course the biggest concerns. The doctor was really nice and told me how his son had drunk a whole bottle of Motrin when he was two; he was also the only person who didn't seem utterly annoyed and exasperated by Eli's dramatic reaction to the ER. I certainly can't blame the kid, though, since the last time he was there he was strapped down, stabbed in the finger with a shot and then sewn up with a needle. I don't think those kind of memories fade too fast.