What Goes In Must Come Out

I am writing this mostly so I can look back with fondness at the years of motherhood when my children still filled the house with stink and laughter.

* PSA for those of you with weak stomachs. You may want to skip this one.

Samuel fell asleep on my lap last night wearing his Sunday dress pants and no shirt. I did not have the wherewithal to change that. My recliner had been draped with a crib-sized quilt which we were sitting on top of. I assumed the quilt had been left behind by someone cozying up on my chair the night before because it was there when I got out of bed. Samuel, my sweet angelic caboose baby that is now 4, weighs about 50 pounds. Getting out from under him required a *momanuever. I leaned forward, picked up his legs from off my lap and dumped them behind my back, careful not to make him do a back flip over the armrest of my chair, and stood up. I was so grateful that it worked. Sometimes momanuevers, thought up in a moment of pure maniacal desperation, backfire.

Somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m. Samuel climbed up next to me in my bed. Not an unusual occurrence. John woke up enough to ask if he was dry, which IS abnormal since Samuel is NOT the bed wetter. More on that later. Samuel said his tummy hurt and then "popped a toot" on my back, this is also not uncommon. Mothers get farted on a lot. I was not totally awake for all this. If I was awake then I was falling back to sleep in record time, drifting in and out of consciousness. My eyes popped back open to see John roll out of bed then walk briskly around it toward my side and our bathroom. Samuel suddenly staggered out of the bed behind me. I figured John was helping him to the toilet so I dozed off again, but only for like 2.5 seconds because then I awoke to the sound of John's voice pointing out the vomit pile on the carpet between our bed and the bathroom. He got Samuel all the way to the toilet and now I had to really wake up because what kind of wife pretends to fall back to sleep,  making her husband do all the work of the vomit clean-up crew? Not me, I guess.

We have 8 kids, as you may know, and as unbelievable as this might sound, in all of our 18 years of working on the vomit clean-up crew we have had almost no carpet pukes. Really, it's true! I thought briefly about that fun fact while contemplating this Chocolate-Peanut Butter-No-Bake-Cookie-mixed-with-stomach-acid splat on my carpet and I kind of didn't know what to do. I went and got my pancake spatula (Bet you just decided to decline any offers of pancakes at my house!), a grocery sack, a wad of paper towels, and started scooping. Samuel is really good at chewing his cookies or else Hannah, the cookie maker, used quick oats, either way my pancake-flipper-puke-picker-upper plan was not really working. I did the best I could at 2 a.m. and was just rinsing out my first wet rag attempt when John said that the chunks needed to be up out of the carpet before we used a wet cloth. He left and came back in with a butter knife and a soup spoon. I'm surprised he wasn't wearing a bib. He was on his own after that. I refuse to sit on the floor in the wee hours of the morning daintily picking up minute pieces of partially digested food particals with the good silver. Instead I went in to the couch where Samuel was now recuperating and told him a story about a magic mouse who could make cheese appear whenever he was hungry. In hindsight maybe that wasn't the best choice. Who wants to think about cheese when your stomach is manufactuing its own curds? He threw up again a few minutes later.

Samuel didn't want to be alone. We came back to the recliner. It was a bit nippy so we stood up and I grabbed the quilt that was conveniently still under our bums. He situated himself across my lap so his head could rest on the soft arm of the chair, and as I fluffed the blanket over our laps, the smell of day old urine assailed our nostrils. Pee that had remained dormant all day and half the night night under this blanket was now soaking up into the seat of my pajamas. After a brief moment of horrified shock I made an executive decision... TO. NOT. CARE. Caring required a shower and new clothes and searching the house for a clean blanket. Some of you reading this will recoil in shock, some of you will just shake your head, but some of you know what I'm talking about. For some of us there comes that moment when all we can do is embrace the insanity and say to ourselves, "at least I am warm."

Before we were lulled back to sleep in our over stuffed urinal, I told Samuel how the throw ups can be contagious. I said that more people in our family would start throwing up just like him. His excited response, "then we can be MATCHERS!"

He is currently settled into a movie downstairs with a "matcher." His big sister made it to my husband's office near her school before throwing up in his garbage can. They have matching gallon Ziplock baggies. Dreams do come true.

*MOMANEUVER - the action taken by a woman desperate to get away from a sleeping child without waking them up. This can be anything from creeping at the pace of an ancient arthritic tortoise while rolling off of a creaking mattress after getting a toddler to sleep, to removing a sleeping 50 lb gorilla child out of the back seat of a vehicle while still wearing a purse and carrying ...stuff, stuff you refuse to make another trip for.