My daughter coined a new phrase this week: Bloop. As in "I just blooped".  What is that? I asked.

It is barf coming out of my bum.

Oh.

And that’s the kind of week it’s been here in chaos. Jenna got hit with a relatively mild case of the gastro bug that is going around. Started with a fever and stomach ache and then the rallying cry: “I am going to barf” just as the projectile liquid hit the floor. There were many, many cleansing baths and then some more baths before she was even dried off. But as any parent who has spent a week with every family member logging hours on the bathroom floor can tell you; having only one person with the stomach flu is getting off easy. (And I really hope I am not tempting the fates by writing that down.)

Stop reading here if you get squeamish because this post is going down the literal toilet from here.

I am going start off with a cliché. A woman’s relationship with her hair stylist is complicated. My friends and I got a taste of how complicated it was last year when our stylist of 15 years got lung cancer.

He started cutting our hair in the fresh-out of university days when we had small disposable incomes, boys to impress and careers just starting out. He gave me my adored-pixie cut that stands in contrast to my mommyish mid-length ‘do of today. He wrangled my friends’ curly hair into bounteous curls and he gave us the confidence to attack our new grown-up lives with enthusiasm.

According to this article by the well-meaning Dr. JJ Levenstein, to keep your kids healthy you just need to avoid indoor areas, cover mouths and wash hands, surround yourself with healthy people, disinfect surfaces and keep sick kids at home.

Wow. OK,  that list is virually impossible to follow. Avoid indoor areas? I'm guessing JJ lives closer to the equator than I do, and possibly does not send kids to the germ-incubator called school, and I would love to disinfect all the surfaces that my kids touch but I am too busy doing laundry and cooking and cruising online, and yes, I try and keep my sick kids at home but they have siblings and those siblings are not on quarantine everytime someone gets sick (no one would ever leave the house) and I might go crazy. So, my kids are going to get sick, and your kids are going to get sick. And once in a while, you get to enjoy having a sick day because it means you get to lie around on the couch and watch movies and drink hot lemon and honey. And other times, you are up all night cleaning up vomit and then spend the whole day -- cleaning up vomit. And sometimes it is a mixture of the two.

I know that this is the time of celebrating and looking forward and I don’t want to be a downer. But do you have a will? Because if you don’t then put it in your New Year’s Resolutions List.

If you don’t have a will because you don’t think you need one, you are wrong. Everyone who has some assets and/or kids needs to have a will. No one expects bad things to happen but they do, they happen to neighbours and friends and they could happen to you. And you don’t want to make the situation worse by not leaving clear instructions (like Michael Jackson did to his kids).