This is the question my son and the Universe were asking me last night.
My youngest barfed all over his bed, the carpet, his pillow and my hopes of a good night sleep.
It was the bad kind. For those of you without kids, whose experience of barf is mostly after a big night of drinking, that means the kind that is almost impossible to clean up. And no matter how old they get, they almost always barf on the way to get you. I had one of them barf on me in bed when he came to wake me to tell me he needed to throw up. I suppose they will learn in time…
But when?
There is a curious kind of physical state that comes over you when you are presented with barf. For most people it is the almost primal need to barf themselves. My husband is so afflicted by this need that he can barely be in the room with the stuff. So, this means that I must do all the post game cleanup. Lucky me.
This is how I know I love them both: the fact that I don’t yell at my son for projectile vomiting through the bed rails and that I love my husband enough to not make him wretch and cough his way through cleaning up with me. (For those of you thinking…that sly dog!, now he doesn’t have to clean up!. You have never met my husband. He is the neatest neat freak in the Universe, and leaving the clean up to me must make him insane because, of course, I am not doing it right.)
During the hour I spent on my knees blotting the stains, only blotting, with Huggies wipes (just a note, they are FANTASTIC at cleaning carpets) I began to muse about my life. I wonder, do Brad and Angelina have a cleaning lady on call to do this?
As a Mom, my love is tested everyday. They want an audience when they poo. They have discovered the joys of walking up to me and farting in my general direction. Burping has become an Olympic sport, yet only at the dinner table. Dog poo and shoes seem to have an unavoidable attraction to each other. Armpit farts are my nightly serenade. In a house awash in testosterone, many things happen that are somewhat beyond me.
And the fact that I put up with all of these things, sometimes even laughing at the armpit farts, shows that real love means that the little things just blend into the wallpaper. Even if it is splattered with puke.
The Blahg 