because, apparently, Tales from Puke Palace was not a stand-alone novel, but the first of a series! we’re not as finished with the puking as i thought. 17 loads of laundry in the last 4 days and still counting!
SUNDAY:
welfareloser (3:18:10 PM): log IN already!
IAlsoHaveADream (7:31:03 PM): In
welfareloser (7:31:17 PM): gimme 20
welfareloser (7:31:25 PM): because FUCK
IAlsoHaveADream (7:31:50 PM): heh. No rush. Happy Easter!
welfareloser (9:31:46 PM): so monkeybeef?
welfareloser (9:31:57 PM): when you first dinged…
welfareloser (9:32:10 PM): had just squirmed out of my lap halfway through a bottle.
welfareloser (9:32:19 PM): looking all pissy and indignant.
welfareloser (9:32:56 PM): then he turned around toward me, holding onto my chair, and looked down at his feet. and started hiccupping.
welfareloser (9:33:08 PM): a little puke falls down his chin and hits the carpet.
IAlsoHaveADream (9:33:15 PM): heh
welfareloser (9:33:23 PM): so i figure, okay, the carpet’s already dirty now, so i’ll just keep him calm, let him finish.
welfareloser (9:33:34 PM): he takes a deep breath, sighs, coughs a bit.
welfareloser (9:33:41 PM): after a moment, pukes a teeny bit more.
welfareloser (9:33:57 PM): then just stands there. looking at it.
IAlsoHaveADream (9:34:03 PM): Proudly?
welfareloser (9:34:13 PM): i wait a while, then ask, “baby, are you finished?”
welfareloser (9:34:19 PM): so he looks UP at me…
welfareloser (9:34:47 PM): just as a 6-inch diameter column of puke shoots 2 feet from his mouth for the next 5 seconds or so.
welfareloser (9:34:52 PM): oh. my. god.
IAlsoHaveADream (9:34:59 PM): UGH
welfareloser (9:35:00 PM): i was COVERED.
welfareloser (9:35:10 PM): he didn’t have a speck on him.
welfareloser (9:35:38 PM): it soaked all the way through my clothes, from the waist down, instantly.
IAlsoHaveADream (9:35:46 PM): ewwwwwwww
welfareloser (9:36:02 PM): so i stripped naked in the kitchen, babywiped, and went to the laundry room to find new clothes.
welfareloser (9:36:06 PM): positiverolemodel was a fan.
IAlsoHaveADream (9:36:24 PM): Did he give a round of applause?
welfareloser (9:36:37 PM): and a leering smirk of appreciation! with ass-smackage!
MONDAY:
it had sunk in by now that the baby wasn’t quite over his bout with the GI-nasties. however, the three older boys were doing great. a little wiped out, and spazmonkey is staying in the spiderman pullups for a few more days (“I GAMBLED AND LOST AGAIN. I DON’T EVER WIN!”) but they were in good spirits, eating normally, etc. so i sent them outside to play, and they ran around various backyards for a good 45 minutes. when they came in, they dropped. like, unwilling to get up to get a cup of water WIPED. so i served them all, filling requests for cups of water and juice, even digging some buttermilk out of the back of the fridge to make pancakes, and throwing bananas and yogurt and other random stuff into the blender for smoothies. spazmonkey passed out ass-up over a kitchen chair toward the end of all the shittin-and-gittin, before he could even eat his pancakes, and i finally had the time to pour a bottle of gatorade for monkeybeef, who had been patiently scooting around the kitchen after me, gnawing on a pancake.
so. this is the part where i realize that the narrow walkway between the kitchen table and the pantry that is the only means of egress from the kitchen to the family room is a major tactical disadvantage. yet another thing the childless remodelers of this house didn’t think of, like the potential disadvantages of white carpet in the dining area.
i was talking to dramaqueen, bending over to pick monkeybeef up off the floor from his magnet-rearranging station in front of the refrigerator, when suddenly spazmonkey’s head pops up from under the far end of the kitchen table.
SM: I GONNA FROW UP!
dq: mom, he say he gonna frow up.
i put monkeybeef down. tried to step over him. dramaqueen was blocking the narrow walkway, and so i tried to get around him without pushing him over. this slowed me down enough that monkeybeef got a hold of my leg. etc. the point is, i didn’t get to spazmonkey fast enough.
dq: mom, he frow up.
SM: I FROW UP WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
dq: mom, he gonna frow up again.
SM: I DON’T FEEL GOOD! I NEED SOME TOAST!
me: sweetie, just calm down. it’s okay. are you going to throw up again?
SM: NO, I NEED PANCAKES!
me: okay. sit down. if you need to throw up again, try to make it to the potty, or the tile floor, okay?
SM: I NEED TO FROW UP!
and so he took off at a run, not toward the bathroom around the corner, but past me, toward the kitchen. i figured the running would do it, and he’d be puking on the carpet again – in a different spot, though, yay! – but, good little boy that he is, he totally managed to hold his cookies for several seconds until he made it to the carpet-to-tile threshhold between the dining area and the kitchen proper. only then, toeing the tile, did he let it fly. and he TOTALLY would have puked all over the easy-to-clean tile floor… had monkeybeef not been in the way.
DQ: mom, monkeybeef need a baff.
SM: I NEED ORANGE JUICE!
DQ: no. orange juice make you frow up!
SM: I NEED WATER!
monkeybeef, sitting quietly on the floor as he played with his fridge magnets, had turned to look up at his approaching big brother to see what all the fuss was about. other than a slight widening of the eyes at the sound that accompanied the ralphing, his only reaction was to blink a few times. then he swiped carefully at the slime that covered his face. then he held out his arms to watch it drip from his heavy shirtsleeves. then he looked down solemnly at the jiggly puddle of chunks in his lap. you could tell that his thoughts were something along the lines of: “how. bout. dat.”
then – having analyzed the situation, evaluated his feelings on the matter, and crunched the data – he did what any reasonable 14-month-old would do. he lifted a hand and started to smack it down toward the pile in his lap, because he definitely needed to play with the puke. common sense dictated the course of his actions. you would have done the same thing in his situation.
i grabbed him just before he made contact. not that it would have done much more than offend my sensibilites at that point, since he was already covered, and SM had yarked with such force that plenty of the puke had bounced off his baby brother and splattered as much as three feet away. really, all i accomplished was to covering my own clothes in puke. so… MB got a bath, PRM got another random serving of sudden nudity, and we now know that monkeybeef has a brilliant future as a ghostbuster.
that’s basically the punchline, though the fun wasn’t over yet. i dragged MB and SM upstairs for a bath. SM flatly refused to get in at the same time as MB. granted, MB has no idea that his brother doesn’t like repeated face-fulls of water. The kid splashes. a lot. taking a bath with him is kind of like swimming in the community pool during the annual fat-kid cannon-ball contest. while i was bathing first MB, then SM, i was vaguely aware of DQ calling up something about how SM shouldn’t eat pancakes, because pancakes make him throw up, but i didn’t really get what he was saying until SM made his way downstairs and freaked because DQ had helpfully eaten SM’s pancakes for him.
later, after bedtime, PRM came down from studying…
PRM: so SM may need some “attention.” he’s up on the toilet, making noises about like i have been for the last week.
me: lemme finish cleaning the reester bunnies out of his basket, and i’ll get right on that.
————————————————————————————-
PRM: how is he?
me: well, some no time-limit, after-bedtime gameboy action is totally taking the sting out of being held hostage by his malfunctioning colon.
PRM: so he’s sitting on the toilet playing video games?
me: yep!
PRM: awesome. how’s DQ?
me: well, he heard the beeping and booping from the bathroom, and i felt bad, so i’m taking him the other gameboy to play in bed until SM’s done.
PRM: okay, then. you go create that monster!
17 loads and counting!
