I had every intention of getting back to posting on the blog regularly. I have multiple half-written posts just sitting in my draft folder at this very moment — posts that I started and never finished because children woke up from a nap, needed a snack, or I simply ran out of steam.

And then last week happened.

Last week was my hardest week of parenting, to date. KC has been traveling to Dublin every week since mid-January, and last week he was gone from Sunday night until late-Friday, meaning I was really on my own allllll week. On Monday schlepped the kids to the doctor to try and get a last-minute flu shot before our trip back to the states next week. I was informed we couldn’t get them (welcome to the Netherlands!); unlike in the states, the flu shot is not widely given here, and you pretty much always have to have some special circumstance in order to get it (either based on where you work or a special health condition). I don’t work in a hospital and am not immuno-compromised, so the girls and I were shooed away, unvaccinated. This was a mild annoyance, but Monday night is really when things got interesting (and by interesting I mean stressful and super frustrating).

I noticed at 10:30pm that our heat had gone out. This had happened three times before in the two weeks prior — the first two times KC or I were able to get it restarted; the third time it went out, it also happened at night (of course) while KC was in Dublin (of course), but by the time the tech showed up at mid-day the next day, it was back on. So in very Dutch fashion, the guy said, “Well, it’s working now,” and left with hardly a second glance at the system. Our heat continued to work for the next week, until it decided it had had enough at 10:30pm on yet another night when KC was out of town. I tried everything to get the system back on for an hour and a half, including pulling the faceplate off of our water heater, to no avail. I finally admitted defeat and woke the girls up to put them in more layers because the overnight low was 27 degrees Fahrenheit and our house is nothing if not exceedingly drafty. The next morning we awoke to the house being a balmy 51 degrees inside, which it remained at until the tech showed up at noon that afternoon — 14 hours after the heat had ceased working. This time the system had not mysteriously kicked back on, and he determined that there was a problem with the wiring connecting the downstairs thermostat to the upstairs water heater. Luckily the complicated-sounding problem had a simple solution, and the heat was back up and running within minutes of a wireless thermostat being installed.

I naively thought the worst of the week was over after this very cold annoyance, only to have Prim start puking just after nap time. She continued to throw up until bedtime, and I went to bed certain that I would be awakened by a midnight puke-in-bed situation. I was woken up at 2am by Lark, who had apparently caught whatever Prim had and vomited Exorcist-style in her crib. I was forced to strip off her sleep sack and pajamas, clean her off, and re-dress her in new pajamas and a sleep sack, then tackle stripping her crib sheet and mattress protector and rinse them in the tub before throwing them into the wash. Then it was only a matter of laying down a new mattress protector, a layer of towels (because hello, obviously) and a clean crib sheet — all of which was pain enough by itself at 2am, but Lark was so upset that she refused to let me put her down, so I was tackling all of this one-handed. And she was still throwing up intermittently, so I was looking for any sign that I needed to hustle her over to the bucket I had left beside Prim’s bed in a naive attempt at avoiding cleaning up puked-on sheets in the middle of the night.

I finally managed to get everything cleaned up and held Lark until she fell back asleep, but not two minutes after I had laid her back down and shut the door, she was throwing up again, which meant the whole process started over. By the time I was done, it was 4am and I was really not feeling well. I went back to bed and attempted to ignore the nausea (something I have a lot of practice in), but I felt so awful that I couldn’t fall asleep until 6am, and then was woken up by the girls at 7:30am (right on time!)

I ended up being sick all of Wednesday, and while you can throw a 2.5 year old in front of Tumble Leaf and Wall-E, an 11 month old does not have the same attention span or interest in animated movies, so I was still fully on mom-duty. Not to mention that because Lark wasn’t feeling well had been up puking half the night, she was terribly irritable and ready to lose it at any real or perceived injustice.

Our evening came to a close with broken glass upstairs (courtesy of Prim not listening to me when I asked her to “please stop playing with that”) and Lark having an epic screaming meltdown due to my not being able to hold her while I cleaned up said glass. Hoo… It was rough, guys.

And honestly, that’s the super-shortened version.

This week has thankfully been without puke and with heat, so that’s an improvement already. My parents are coming into town and Larky turns one on Friday (we’re having a party this weekend.) Lots going on in the Deatsch house! I’ll try to keep the blog updated with at least some of the goings-on, but right now, I’m off to bed.

*I should note that last week made our decision to move back to California feel very much like the right choice. Parenting little ones without a family support system nearby is really tough, and some weeks it feels downright impossible.