It's always the roast beef

We have reached a blissfully quiet end to a long, miserable 24 hours (give or take). I now know why I got sick, after both Mike and Dominick began vomiting within about ten minutes of each other last night. We all ate the offending roast beef for dinner on Thursday, but for some reason it affected me first, and in the meantime, they ate it again and paid a much steeper price. (They probably threw up 35 times combined. Sorry if that's too much information, but now you know just how bad it was.) I had recovered sufficiently to assume the caretaker role, which meant starting the first of several loads of laundry, cleaning Dominick up as much as possible, and getting him back to sleep for a few minutes before the next bout of sickness. I stayed in his room all night, running back upstairs twice to feed Noel, who chose the worst possible night to wake up an additional time. Then Dominick decided he was ready to get up at 5:50 am. Needless to say, I got absolutely no sleep last night. Fortunately, the boys and I took a nice long nap this afternoon, which is why I'm able to function at all tonight. Dom seems to feel better and even ate a couple of small, bland meals today. Mike may stay home from work again tomorrow. When he gets sick, he gets really sick. This happened last fall when he ate some suspect roast beef at the cafeteria.

I called Sam's Club this morning to report the bad beef they had sold, and the woman in the meat department basically blew me off with a chipper "Oh, okay!" that really said, "And you're telling me because...?" When I asked about getting our money back, she snapped "You'll have to ask customer service about that." That was not exactly the response I was hoping for, so I called again and got the meat manager, who at least seemed to care somewhat and promised we would get a refund. He also said that there hadn't been any other complaints. Tomorrow, I will contact the county health department. If anyone else got sick, I hope they report it, too.

In the midst of the drama today, I did manage to feed Noel some rice cereal, which he seemed to like. Either that or he liked chomping on the spoon. Regardless, he ate all that I gave him. And later, I took his monthly photo. He'd been crying a minute before but gave me this great smile: