If you don't like vomit. . .

. . . stop reading now. Also, keep in mind that I'm exhausted, so this might not be the stellar writing quality you're used to on this blog.

Imagine this scene: a child lies asleep on the living room floor, at her mother's feet (literally between the chair and the ottoman). The mother sits, half-watching "Pride and Prejudice" (with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle), and nodding off to sleep. The father, tired, sits to write a blog entry.

As you have guessed, that's what our house looks like right now. While I normally spend my nights working on either my dissertation or my teaching responsibilities, last night was different. Plainbellied and I got a baby-sitter and went to the movies with some friends. We saw "Hot Fuzz" (loved it! look for a review soon). After we came home, things seemed great. Her Nibs was in bed and had eaten a lot for a change. Plainbellied and I watched "The Queen" (not my kind of movie), then she went to bed and I sat down to grade papers at 1:00 AM.

That was the end of the good times. Usually, it's my job to put Her Nibs back in bed if she wakes up at night. Around 3:00 AM, I heard her start crying, so I went upstairs to put her back to sleep. She seemed fine, but as I started to put her down, she started crying again, so I picked her up. As I did so, she puked all over me. I've seen vomit, but this was more than I had seen go on a single person. My shirt and pants were soaked, and it reeked. Frankly, it made me want to vomit.

Since I was already soaked, I got Her Nibs into the bathroom and turned on the water. This is when I realized I couldn't do it alone. So I yelled for Plainbellied, who had only been asleep for two hours, to wake up and help me. My plan was to start Her Nibs in the bath and turn her over to Plainbellied while I went and cleaned up the mess left on the carpet. Things went well, but we took her downstairs while I cleaned to make sure that everything had come up.

After about an hour, I had finished cleaning, and Her Nibs was ready to go back to bed. I started rinsing off our clothes when I heard Plainbellied cry out, "Come help me!" When I went back, Her Nibs had puked on Plainbellied, and we now had a new mess to clean up. So we put Her Nibs back in the bathtub to clean her up, and I worked on the clothes and carpet. After a while, she really wanted to go to bed, because she was so tired. But, as she walked to the stairs, she yakked on the carpet. Another bath and now there were no clean nightgowns. More cleaning. At around 5:00, things had calmed down, so we finally got to put her back to bed.

You probably know what happened next. Her Nibs puked on the bed. At least we had figured out that we shouldn't give her anything to eat or drink by now, so she only had a little bit left. Plainbellied took her into the shower while I cleaned up the bed. I learned that it's much easier to clean up a plastic-covered bed than to clean up carpet, and I was happy about that. We put her in bed again, and she finally started to go to sleep, even though her pig was now in the wash, a casualty of the previous attempt to put Her Nibs in bed. Thirty seconds later, she came out of her room and said, "I have to puke." She likes to use that word. She also says things like, "I'm not pukey anymore," or "I got puke all over!"

From then on, we knew how to play it. Since we caught it, no bath was needed. But now she was staying with us for good. She sat on Plainbellied's lap for a while, and we came up with a system: Plainbellied held a cup, and I had a wet paper towel ready. Every half hour or so, Her Nibs said, "I have to puke," so we put up the cup, and she puked in it, then I wiped her up, rinsed out the cup, and replaced it with a clean one. She actually got a little sleep on Plainbellied's lap, and then she crawled onto the floor and fell asleep there. And there we stand. I'm about to go to the store for ginger ale, Plainbellied is going in and out of sleep on the chair watching "Pride and Prejudice," and Her Nibs is asleep on the floor (at least until she has to vomit again).

By now, you're grossed out, and you wonder why I told you all of this. I'm not trying to set us up as a pair of martyrs. I've learned something tonight. I'm at the point now where I am way past my bedtime, and I didn't get much sleep yesterday. Plainbellied only got a few hours of sleep last night. We're exhausted. But neither of us got grouchy. It is frustrating and maddening to watch your child get sick, but neither of us resents it. When Her Nibs first threw up on me, I felt like I was doing exactly what a parent is supposed to do. Our kid throws up on us, we clean it, and we don't complain.

Don't get me wrong, it's not fun. It sucks (and smells). But it's what parents do. If you'll excuse me, I need to go clean up some more vomit.