Picnic Payback

I don’t cope well with heat. This is not new. It’s not just that I dislike it or that it makes me uncomfortable. It’s not just that my skin is naturally the colour of freshly fallen snow at high noon — it will blind you! It’s not just that it makes me thirsty and lethargic. The heat literally makes me sick. Literally literally, guys.

So when I heard that the forecast for last Friday was supposed to be 38 degrees Celsius before the humidity, I planned to spend the entire afternoon basking in our cool air conditioned house. (And now that we’ve paid for that new central air we can’t afford to go anywhere else anyway! So it works!) But then an old friend was in town just for the day without a car and the easiest way for us to visit would be to just meet up at a park and let the kids splash around in the wading pool.

How bad it could be?

We ate a picnic lunch in the shade and I must have remarked half a dozen times on how it really didn’t feel that hot after all. Sometimes the weather hype is so overblown. We were there about three hours and I worried a little bit about the kids playing in the direct sunlight in the playground in between jaunts in the wading pool, but I stayed firmly planted in the shade the whole time. It was a really good visit and the kids had a blast. Can you believe I almost locked us all inside because I was afraid of a little heat?

We finally packed away all the food and water and sunscreen and towels and changes of clothes and blankets and diapers and maybe it was the sheer volume of stuff or something, but I felt a little headache coming on. Whatever, nothing a big gulp of water can’t fix. We headed up to the car which I had smartly parked in a nice patch of shade. What the?! Stupid sun moving through the sky and messing with my shady parking spot. I opened up all the doors and windows and felt a rush of hot air coming from the car that had now been roasting in direct sun for who-knows-how long.

Interlude: When buying a family car in a November snow storm, don’t forget that no matter how good a deal the last of last year’s cars may be, if it doesn’t come with air conditioning you will regret it. So badly.

Right, so my car doesn’t have air conditioning and the kids are crying and whining about how hot it is and all I can do is remind them that the faster we get in, the faster we can get moving and hopefully get some breeze action happening. But it was me who was on the brink of tears when we hit a traffic jam and were idling in the hottest mid-day heat of the year, tripling the time it should take us to get home. The choruses of “I’m hungry,” and, “I’m thirsty,” and, “I want to watch TV when we get home,” weren’t helping.

By the time we pulled into our parking spot, I knew I wasn’t in good shape. I hustled the kids into the house and made sure to unload all the food and wet towels and suits from the car right away. All I wanted to do was lie down, but I sensed that I’d better take care of this stuff while I could.

Inside, I gulped some more water and poured a glass each for the two big kids and set them up with a snack in front of the TV. I put Mary down on the living room floor and then lay down beside her. Maybe if I could just sprawl out under the ceiling fan I would start to feel better. Mary was climbing all over me and the kids were completely zoned out on TVO and I wasn’t feeling better at all. “Colum,” I called out, “Call Dad at work and tell him I’m sick.” I was shivering and sweating at once, my head was throbbing and the whole room was spinning. He finally made the call:

“Hi Dad.”

“Hi Colum. How are you?”

“Good.”

“How was swimming today?”

“It was good.”

Me, gasping from floor, “Tell him. Telllll him. Tell him.”

“Oh, mom’s sick. She’s on the floor.”

I finally took the phone and reassured Ed that I was not, in fact, having a heart attack or otherwise bleeding from my eyeballs or whatever other horror it must have sounded like. I did, however, seem to have a touch of the heat stroke or something and was feeling like crap. Ed promised he’d leave work to come home as soon as possible.

Next, I calmly got up, went to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of water and took the big, blue plastic bowl out of the cupboard. I sat down with these at the dining room table, put my head on my arms and waited. There was such a lot of vomit. And in between puking and heaving and retching, I kept calling out, “Colum! What does Mary have? Take that out of her mouth!”

This was not good. I put Mary in the playpen for her own safety, called my Mom and asked her to come over right away. (Living a five minute drive away from your parents when you have young kids, highly recommended.) She was over within a few minutes and, ohmygod, it was such a relief to not have to worry about anyone else but myself. She helped me up to my bed where I passed out promptly.

An hour later I was basically fine, but still. An afternoon at the park makes me violently ill? How pathetic is that? Note that the kids were all fine and that I stayed in the shade the entire time and I didn’t even feel that hot. Does this even happen to other people? Or am I the only one?

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