Oh man… It’s 12:47am the night (morning?) after who-knows-how-many days of little Henry doing his best impression of a two-ended Mt. Vesuvius. Actually it’s not quite that bad: it’s been just a few days, but having just scraped up another night’s load of barf from his bed, I’m a little spent (yet now too wired to sleep).
Earlier in the week Henry acquired a cute little panda we named Peter. As Hen sleeps on his big n’ beloved Panda Bear, he’s decided that Peter is Panda Bear’s kid, “and the Ollies are the moms.” Just now when I dashed into his room, I found that everyone had gotten pretty yucky. Hen was distraught: “I puked on Peter’s parents!!”
Ah, but that’s the thing of it: “When I puke it feels like not fun,” Henry said in the kitchen (as I scrubbed off the animals), and yet these little moments can have their charm. We love the lads so much, and we can bond through a little humor & enjoy pulling through the rough patches together. And now, having said that, let’s get past these bugs and get some sleep!
4 replies on “Tranquility, with a side of puke”
I’ve had some pretty good barfy bonding moments with both kids.
Peter Panda puked a peck of pickled peppers? Sorry to hear Hen’s under the weather, but you will always remember the time he “puked on Peter’s parents”! lol
[Whether I want to or not! 🙂 I can’t say I ever expected to encourage someone to “Go ahead, barf into my hands,” but life’s funny that way… –J.]
My son at the age of three and a half or so decided on his first day with his big boy bed, he’d actually been sleeping on a mattress on his floor or a while until the “perfect” bed was found, decided that jumping on the bed would be more fun than nap. My wife and I were on the couch and heard the thump, and there was a silence. Ulysses was not my first child, I have a daughter ten years older, and I immediately could hear from the _perfect_ silence that this was not “lets make sure someone is looking before we cry” or any variation. She was looking rather shocked as I was across the house and in his room before he managed to make his first real noise at all. We don’t know what he landed on, but to cut to the chase (which has the only part he really liked, when the hospital caught fire upstairs while he was in the ER, and every fire truck and fireman in Vallejo came to put it out).
One small plastic surgery later, in spite of having been loaded up with anti-nausea medication before surgery the poor thing had the typical small child’s reaction to being put under: non stop barfing for 6 or 8 hours.
The poor thing was miserable. and there wasn’t too much you could do. So I spent the night, holding my barfing son in my lap with a couple towels and a big bowl, watching the same Thomas the Tank Engine episode on Netflix over and over and over and over again.
The poor thing will probably be really mad when he is 10 and finds out that if we hadn’t taken him in for reconstruction he would have had an ultra cool pirate/villan scar down the middle of his face. Parents are terrible, ruin all the cool stuff that way I guess. But it was a bonding experience, my daughter had never required much more than bandaids and the holding would be comfort, but not quite the sharing of the misery he and I had.
And he’ll thank us he didn’t have the scar when he stop playing pirate and discovers girls 🙂
Thanks for leaving your experience for me to stumble on to. I have been far away from him for many months, his Fifth birthday was last week and the phone call was exciting or him but hard for me. For the first four years he and I were inseparable. I changed jobs and schedules so that I would be both home and free most of the day, which we spent mostly outdoors. When production did require a schedule that took me away I tried to make sure it was me who took him to and from daycare.
This afternoon I got to enjoy what I miss so much through your eyes for a little. Thank you.
(don’t look at my website, it isn’t production ready by 50 miles, in fact I need to push the current stage up, but I’m waiting for the WP release to go final so I can do it all at once.)
Ouch, looking at the length of this beast, and how pitiful I sound to myself after the smiley face in particular, you can feel free to please not post, or heavily edit this pig. I’ve been spending too much time alone, and my only language has been the poetry of code for a while.