Vacation FAIL

Have you ever had to use a barf bag?

It's not exactly a club one aspires to be a member of, I realize.

But a week ago on Delta Flight 2112, a Motion Sickness Bag and I became fast friends, making me the last member of our small family to be victimized by a nasty Dominican Republic bug.

We were supposed to return from our week-long vacation in Club Med in Punta Cana on Wednesday the 21st, but after my husband and Baba G fell ill Saturday and Sunday, respectively, we realized it was better to get back home as soon as possible — especially since the pediatrician's office would be closed on Thanksgiving.

And then I got sick on our Atlanta > Chicago leg, so we made the right choice. We stepped foot in our condo Monday evening, not a moment too soon.

My husband has been known to get sick when we travel, so when he came down with a ton of unpleasant symptoms late Saturday night (the 17th), I chalked it up to him not heeding my warnings about avoiding the resort's salad bar.

But then Sunday night Baba G wailed and wailed, and I knew something was off. He's usually a great through-the-night sleeper, and had been perfect for our first four nights in the pack 'n play the resort provided.

Sunday evening, however, he was so miserable that I brought him into bed with me and banished my husband to the other room (he was still extremely sick so needed to be away from us, anyway).

I snapped this picture of BG finally resting in a mass of pillows shortly before he got up Monday morning:

Sleep, at last.

Why is he only in his diaper, you ask? Maybe because the air conditioning in our room was broken and we were suffering in a very humid and stuffy 78 degrees.

After he woke up, it was clear he was not well. I will spare you the details, but let's just say that all of the things the Travel Clinic had forewarned us could go wrong, DID go wrong. On top of that, the extra-heavy-duty medicine they gave us to cure Baba G of all foreign germ invaders wouldn't stay down.

That's when we decided we had to pay the crazy-high airline change fees and cut our trip short. Thankfully, BG did not have as rough of a time coming home as I did.

I didn't even have to give anyone around us earplugs! He slept the whole way home.

Once we were back in Chicago Monday night, the worst of it hit me. My husband and I were so incredibly sick and weak that when BG woke up Tuesday morning covered in, um, a mess, I knew we needed help. So at 6:30 a.m. I called my parents, who I knew would not hesitant to make the five-hour drive from Michigan to come be with their ailing grandson (and, you know, us).

Over the next two days my husband and I got better, but Baba G did not. And then, at around 5:30 a.m. Thanksgiving morning, BOTH of my parents got violently ill within about ten minutes of each other, I kid you not.

I felt like a total ass because I had just assumed all of us had ingested something bad at the resort. Even though we only used bottled water for BG, I figured that since he puts his mouth on EVERYTHING, he had clearly licked up a deviant germ. But once my parents became sick then I knew we were dealing with some sort of contagious virus.

This whole situation was — and still is — awful, but what makes it so much worse is that my brother and his wife are having their first baby literally any second now (her due date was yesterday), and now my parents cannot go out to visit them in D.C. for at least two weeks to ensure they're no longer contagious. As Cher said best, "If I could turn back ti-iime...."

Baba G is not at 100% yet and since it's been over a week, we're hauling him back to the pediatrician's office tomorrow (we went in on Tuesday, too... stay tuned for a post on Taking Poo Samples for Parasite Sampling!).

Needless to say, he's not a fan of Thanksgiving (that's his 10-month birthday sticker on him below).

What the hell happened to all of us?

I regret a lot of things about our trip... about going to the Dominican Republic in the first place... etc., etc. I will probably never forgive myself. But we did at least have three fun days together as a family on our first vacation with BG, and then he and I had a nice mommy/son day alone before all hell broke loose.

Here's some proof:

I hope to be back with a much happier post soon! And I hope your Thanksgiving was better than ours was... it kind of HAD to be, right?