My VD Badge

This week I earned my Mom badge for Vomit Duty (VD).  

No, not the baby vomit, spit up variety, you know, the for real, GET THE BOWL BECAUSE WE'RE SITTING ON THE COUCH AND I DON'T WANT TO SMELL THIS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE vomit.  

Here's how it went down:  9:30 PM, Thursday night.  Both kids sound asleep upstairs.  Matt away at school for the weekend.  I'm on the phone with a friend when I hear Carson crying out, terrified. It's a distinctly different cry, I don't wait to see if he settles. I rush to his side and reach out to touch his face.  I feel something wet on my arm. Ugh. Then I smell it. And feel it.

Yep. Chunks. In the bed. And on the wall. 

My sweet little two year and nine month old boy doesn't move.  He just lies there, crying and awake, but frozen in fear.  He stops crying long enough to make a request, "Mommy, get a washcloth." Wow, good idea, dude.  Where'd you learn that, a past life as a drunk?  

"Get it off my arm." Oh my poor sweetie. Even at two he knows how completely foul it is to lie in your own vomit. 

The next fifteen minutes probably are something he'll seek therapy for in the future, because I absolutely have no choice but to take him to the tub and hose him down like some kind of Guantanamo Bay Abu-Gray Prison terrorism suspect. Poor little guy has chunks in his hair, on his neck, all over him.  Terrified and still shaky from vomiting, there is no amount of verbal consoling that helps. In the end I manage to spray the chunks off of him without letting him slip and crack his head open.  His screams awake Amelia, of course, who's room shares a wall with the bathroom shower.  Her cries quickly escalate into the fearful shrieks of a terrified baby.  Probably out of sympathy for her brother.  

In quasi-crisis situations like this, everything slows down for me, my heart pounds.  My brain begins making to-do lists to resolve the crisis like some kind of Operations Management textbook problem. I stack the priorities and begin planning their completion: 

1. Breastfeed the 10 month old and put her back to bed

2. Scrub the puke off the walls

3. Wash the bedding (especially coveted "blankie").  Just a quick aside: as it turns out, the chunks don't always come out in the wash, as they say, so I advise shaking them out beforehand. 

4. Monitor the puking child sitting in front of the TV (wreaking of vomit because I could not manage to get soap on him during his GTMO shower) in case of subsequent hurls.  Special caution, there is a shag rug involved. 

5. Redress the bed. 

6. Read story and cuddle the sick child back to sleep. 

Here is where my inability to accept help from others is completely insane.  I actually spend a moment evaluating this to-do list in my head as both Carson and Amelia continue to cry at the top of their lungs.  Matt's out of town, so there is no chance of waiting it out until he gets home.  Items #1 and #6, are mom-only tasks (yeah, ya think)?  Item #4 has to happen in parallel with everything else.  How the hell do single parents do this?  I'll tell you how: the sane ones ask for help. 

Enter Steve and Heather. My angels.  My God, I swear, there have been so many situations in our lives where without them we'd be F'd. I mean, for real. They live three blocks away, but I am sure they would be just as responsive if they lived an hour away.  They came over in the middle of the night when I went into labor. They take our calls any time, arrive with open arms for our kids, comic relief for the adults, and often, tasty food.  As a bonus, Steve is a Chef, and my "adopted" little brother. 

This time they pull through for us again. I interrupt their dinner at a restaurant while I try to calm Amelia and cue up PBS Kids for Carson on the DVR. Steve and Heather change their food order to go and arrive in minutes. As I'm scrubbing puke off Carson's walls, Heather comes upstairs. "He needs mommy." I hear Carson whimpering downstairs. I meet Heather's eyes with exhaustion, defeated, holding the disinfectant in one hand and a rag in the other, "I need to get this off the walls or the smell is going to make him sick again." 

Before I even finished the sentence, she's rolling up her sleeves, taking the rags from me, and waving me off-- "Go be his Mommy."   That's friendship. Someone who scrubs your kid's puke off the wall.  

Later, Heather gets another friend of the year nomination when Carson ambushes me with a hurl mid-sentence while watching Clifford. I'm completely paralyzed in fear and attempting to catch it my own hands (God, did I ever think I'd do that for anyone? Ever?).  She quickly grabs the puke bowl, pulling it under his chin and expertly grabing his neck and aiming his face into the bowl. Wow. Let's hear it for that sorority house training, huh? Kidding... I don't even know if Heather was in a sorority, but it sounds good. 

The beautiful thing about this evening (and yes, amidst the puking there still is a beautiful thing), is that Steve and Heather were not the only friends who would have done this for us tonight.  We are so very fortunate to have so many great friends who are like this, so many that sometimes the sinister side of my brain wonders how long this blessed season of our lives will last. Then I remember these are relationships we've built on years of reliability with each other. They don't happen overnight, but with commitments to working through stuff together, weathering the normal ups and downs of life, and accepting each other at face value, assets and defects (and by defects, I'm referring to mine) in all. I am so thankful God has put them in our lives. 

I can't wait until Steve and Heather have kids so we can be there in the same way for them.  Well... then again, who really hopes to be able to scrub puke-walls,…? Ah. Maybe I can settle for a dirty diaper or two?