Most guys are complete wusses when they’re sick.

(HA! I just wrote “pregnant” instead of sick. That was funny. Anyway…)

Most guys, when sick, roll around in agony, whine in misery, certain that they are writhing on death’s doorstep.

Not Clint.

This man has the immune system of an elephant.

(This is, of course, assuming elephants have excellent immune systems. I, for one, have never seen a sick elephant, so I’m going with that analogy.)

And the suck-it-up-ness of something equally tough.

(Sorry, I’m out of animal analogies. My brain is still stuck on sick elephants.)

The week after the Fourth of July, he was sick. Knocked-on-his-ass, miserable, don’t-kiss-me-I-don’t-want-your-disease… sick. It was bad news. He had to take days off work, which he never does. He ended up going back to work, although he was still sick, for fear that they’d think he was playing hookie, since it was the nicest weather week we had seen all summer.

(Read more about me being pissed about that, here.)

His ears started hurting later in the week. He sucked it up and tried to ignore it. It got worse. Friday night, it was horrendously bad. Unfortunately, I was unaware of his misery and unable to help him out because I had consumed a ridiculous amount of Fireball Whiskey and was too busy sobbing on the floor about my glasses… Seriously. I have never been so tossed in my entire life. It. Was. Bad. Not my proudest moment.

Saturday morning, he was all but writhing in pain. I knew he was in bad shape. He put his head in my lap and plugged his ears and I stroked his hair. He was all but sobbing from the pulsating, stabbing, pain in his ears.

Not soon enough, the walk-in clinic opened and he headed out.

I got an idea.

His ears were sensitive to noise, and the kids weren’t going to be quiet, so why not get away for the night? We had a gift certificate to Semiahmoo Resort and Spa (say: Sem-ee-ah-moo) that Clint had received from work last year. I asked my mom if she could come up and watch the kids for a night. She said yes.

“On one condition…”

I tensed. I don’t usually like conditions.

“You let me buy you a massage,” she said. “They’re amazing.”

Now that’s my kind of condition!

I booked the hotel room, made dinner reservations (seriously, this was an enormous gift certificate, I don’t know why we didn’t use it sooner), and started packing our bags. I panicked for a minute, wondering if Clint would even want to go, since he was so miserable. I rationalized that it’d be better to be sick and hurting in a cozy hotel room than our house, with kids screaming and running amok.

He arrived home with this story:

The doctor (insert shout-out to Dr. P) looked in one of his ears and said, “Woah!” He peered in the other ear and said, “Woah…” He told Clint that his first ear was the worst ear infection he had seen all year…

Until he looked in the second ear.

Poor guy, right? I felt bad for him.

I broke the news to Clint about our impromptu getaway. He was totally on board. We left as soon as my mom arrived.

I drove, because that’s what I do…

And sipped my Red Bull… ‘cuz that’s what I do when I’m tired.

Fortunately, Clint started feeling better pretty soon after taking his medicine and downing plenty of ibuprofen. We checked in and walked down to have dinner…

…on the patio, looking out on the beach. This was our view (and I didn’t bring my super stalker lens, so you can see that we were very close to the water.) Check out that rainbow!

{Completely off-topic, but if you haven’t watched this rainbow clip, you absolutely must. Beginning to end. Go now. I’ll wait.}

Okay, you’re back. Good.

Here we are at dinner (our drinks were as nummy as they look):

Afterward, we endured the enormously long twenty yard endeavor to the beach, where I proceeded to make Clint pose for my camera.

Can you tell he was feeling better?

(Fun fact: You can see my reflection in his sunglasses, kneeling over my tripod.)

Then, I pulled one of those “hide behind your man to disguise your flabby torso” moves. He retaliated by making a goofy face:

And then I groped him.

And he liked it.

The sunset was stellar and I was upset with myself for not bringing the stalker lens.

The land you see across the water is Canada. Fortunately, you don’t need a passport to take pictures of, or look at, Canada. (Nobody turn me in if you do.)

Look at the purdy purples!

Of course, we had to get one of these:

And…

(Kids, close your eyes.)

One of these too:

We ran out of time for the massages, but my mom told me to keep the money she gave me anyway. We went out for drinks that night (where I had an eeensy little “I’m going through a quarter-life crisis” conversation with Clint, and ended up realizing I over-analyze way too much in my life, but made me feel so much better in the end), back to our room (we had two queen beds… We used them for different things… that started with “s.” I’ll let you work out the details of that one), and off to sleep.

The next morning, we had coffee on the beach.

We went home. Life resumed as normal. We wished for a few more days, but were thankful for the time we had.

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the business of parenting. Clint and I work phenomenally well together. We know what to do, depending upon what the other person is doing. We move fluidly through mealtimes, cleanup, bedtime, and all of the in-between. We get so caught up in the routine and the business of it all, that we forget about each other. We forget about taking time out. Soon, we’re simply a team, focused on raising children, instead of a team who raises children and laughs and plays together on the side.

It is too easy to forget each other, and the most important aspect of parenting our kids: our marriage. I hope we’ll always have opportunities to refocus, and the drive to maintain and improve our relationship time and time again.

But for now, back to that elephant thing:

What if an elephant were to get sick? Could you imagine how nasty it would be when an elephant sneezed?

Yick.