It's amazing how priorities change with sick kids

My mother always told me that how you spend your New Year's Eve is a foreshadowing of how you will spend the rest of your year.

Well, I sincerely hope that's not true, or else 2011 holds a year's worth of late nights, drugs and waking up covered in someone else's vomit.

Sadly, my night wasn't quite as wild as that sentence would have you believe.

Here's what happened: Both of my daughters got sick while traveling to visit the in-laws this year. Both were up all night coughing so hard that they ended up getting sick all over the closest thing — me.

You'd think this would have completely grossed me out and sent me running in to do a midnight load of laundry. Nope. I just carefully avoided the wet spots and went back to bed.

Somehow when you're a mom these disgusting moments just don't seem like a big deal. In fact, the only thing that matters in these times is making sure your child feels better — fast.

It's amazing how priorities change when your kid is sick. My girls don't have anything serious, and yet I dropped everything to help them get through their sickness. My husband slept on the floor by one child and I sat up at night all week making sure the baby could breathe in her sleep.

Here are a few tips I learned during this week's bout with sickness in our house:

1. Prepare for epic meltdowns — A sick toddler is about the worst combination you can have when it comes to meltdowns over absolutely nothing. If I just looked at my 3-year-old daughter the wrong way, she collapsed into a pile of tears on the floor. One day I made the unforgivable mistake of giving her apples instead of pears for lunch, a sin so egregious that she wound up on the floor quietly sobbing to herself, "Pears, pears, pears."

2. Don't be afraid to be that mom — No one wants to be the annoying mom who is greeted with a "oh, you again" eye-roll at the pediatrician's office. But the truth is that gaining a reputation as that mom is well worth the humiliation if it means your kids get well.

3. Bookmark WebMD — Go ahead and admit defeat. You've tried to avoid looking up every symptom online, but now is the time to give in. You're going to look up how much Tylenol to give. You're going to look up what a cough and a fever can mean. You're even going to do a Google image search for that rash now covering your baby's body. Don't be a hero. Just do it. You know you're going to.