Halfway down the Danube

Barf

This post is about exactly what the title says. It has nothing to do with Romania, travel, politics, poetry, love, or indeed anything pleasant or fun. You might want to go away now and read something else.

So both the boys were vomiting today. Alan took the morning off, and lulled us into a sense of complacency, and then barfed twice in the afternoon. David, stealthy and cunning, didn't vomit all day long. That's because he was saving it all for a single sudden, enormous, surprise after-dinner barf.

Little kids barf in the worst way. They're big enough that they can get some serious volume and force going. And they're no longer doing baby barf, which is just milk or mush, and not particularly offensive. No, they eat real food, so they barf real barf, with the chunks and the acid smell and all of that. But they're small enough that they don't even try to aim it somewhere harmless, never mind running for a sink or toilet. No. A barfing two-year-old will spew all over himself, his toys, the carpet, the bookshelf, and his mother as she rushes frantically towards him, cupped hands outstretched.

Barfing is more than just messy and disgusting, of course. It can be scary. Little kids don't have a lot of reserves, especially when they're skinny little kids (like Alan). And they dehydrate really easy. So repeated vomiting, itself a symptom, can lead to other problems. And, scarier still, very small kids in bed can choke on it. So it's not just disgusting.

But "disgusting" is the first reaction. And here's a truth I have just learned about myself: I hate barf. Hate it. I guess I had always vaguely known this, but I never consciously realized it until the last couple of days. I think the aversion is the sort that gets energized by repeated exposure: one barf, no big deal; two days of barfing, and I'm starting to retch myself.

Anyway, it came to me last night, when I was down on my knees wiping up Alan's latest. Claudia (who was in the next room cleaning Alan himself) made some comment, and I found myself snarling at her. This is not very typical. After I had some time to think about it, I realized the emotional chain went something like "Deep, involuntary disgust -> outrage -> general foul-tempered truculence".

It passed after a few minutes. But when David made an even larger delivery this evening (pizza with black olives and salami, because I just had to share that) I had the same reaction all over again. Bit my tongue, though, because now I realized where it was coming from. You can't control your involuntary reactions, but you can control what you do about them, if you see what I mean.

And hey, parenting is nothing if not a wondrous voyage of self-discovery.

The boys are sleeping quietly in the next room. But I'll sleep on the couch tonight, with my head right by their door, just in case.

Posted by douglas at July 9, 2005 09:30 PM