Miserable Vomitous Mass
Parenting helps you develop a certain skill set. You learn how to tell whether your kid has a fever, or a just warm head from being tired, with the back of your hand. You learn how to do a shocking number of things one-handed. You learn how to feed and/or soothe a baby in the small hours of the morning without ever being fully awake yourself. You hone a sense of hearing so fine you sometimes hear your children before they actually wake up calling for you. You gain the ability to see through the back of your skull, and to kiss away booboos. You grow a Voice of Authority (if you didn't already have one from your line of work).
I'm confident that while some of these skills were perhaps previously unnecessary, you look back after a while and think, "Of course, I needed to develop that."
The ones that surprise me are the highly specialized skills that have virtually no non-parenting applications, for example the ability to remove the straps and cover to a car seat. You wouldn't need to know how to do that unless you needed to do that. The way you'd need to do that if a three year old boy threw up all over his car seat while you were driving him home from school.
And so, like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, I cleaned up the mess. Sadly, I didn't hae Travolta and Jackson to do the actual cleaning. I shuffled the kids out of the car and into the house, stripped the sick little offender of his upchuck encrusted clothing, requisitioned a roll of paper towel and a trash bag from Big Brother J, strapped on a pair of rubber gloves, and grabbed the Clorox spray.
The trouble I ran into was the fact the nastiness had smeared into the straps, necessitating that they be washed along with O's coat, clothing, and the fabric cover from the car seat. But how to remove the cover? and how to extricate the straps? Well, I flipped it over, reeking of undigested food, and set to figuring out how it's put together.
And now I know how it's put together, and how to take it apart.
And I also know how to be thankful he missed his sister and my son in the process.
(added 4/1/08: as a postscript, O was fine by morning, and other than being tired, he's back to his old tricks)
I'm confident that while some of these skills were perhaps previously unnecessary, you look back after a while and think, "Of course, I needed to develop that."
The ones that surprise me are the highly specialized skills that have virtually no non-parenting applications, for example the ability to remove the straps and cover to a car seat. You wouldn't need to know how to do that unless you needed to do that. The way you'd need to do that if a three year old boy threw up all over his car seat while you were driving him home from school.
And so, like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, I cleaned up the mess. Sadly, I didn't hae Travolta and Jackson to do the actual cleaning. I shuffled the kids out of the car and into the house, stripped the sick little offender of his upchuck encrusted clothing, requisitioned a roll of paper towel and a trash bag from Big Brother J, strapped on a pair of rubber gloves, and grabbed the Clorox spray.
The trouble I ran into was the fact the nastiness had smeared into the straps, necessitating that they be washed along with O's coat, clothing, and the fabric cover from the car seat. But how to remove the cover? and how to extricate the straps? Well, I flipped it over, reeking of undigested food, and set to figuring out how it's put together.
And now I know how it's put together, and how to take it apart.
And I also know how to be thankful he missed his sister and my son in the process.
(added 4/1/08: as a postscript, O was fine by morning, and other than being tired, he's back to his old tricks)
Labels: The Carpet Bag
posted by Cameron | 6:12 PM
3 Comments:
So impressive. Similarly, I can now uncork a bottle of wine, while simulaneously fileting a dover sole and reciting the nightly specials.
I also have to add that undigested food is my favorite kind of food.
"vomitous" is a very troubling word.
Glad O was fine so quickly. Often small people are! It is, to me, amazing what we, as parents, do. While our small people now have small people of their own to care for, we have a multitude of pets, and have developed pretty good mess cleaning skills dealing with them. :O) It's just a slightly different kind of parenting. You did great! samm
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