30 days of blogging and some vomit

This morning when I was going through my blog comments deleting all the spam I get each day from spammers trying to get me to enlarge my penis or buy metal roofing products from them, I took a look at the side bar and saw how my blog posts have been fewer and fewer over the past year.

I could blame my kids for not doing enough ridiculous things to write about, or the unusual lack of chaos in my life lately, or the fact I was preoccupied for four months marathon training .. but although it’s definitely a factor it probably wouldn’t be entirely true.

Every blogger wants people to read their posts. In the beginning my writing confidence was low so I’d only post one out of roughly every three posts I wrote because I was worried they weren’t good enough or that people wouldn’t like them. For about a year I wouldn’t post anything until I’d sent it to my gorgeous friend Sally for her to read first and tell me if it was funny enough.

Nobody wants to be un-followed and I had a particular hangup about it. Even two years down the track I don’t think that fear, although it’s less, has ever left me.

So I decided back then that quality not quantity was my motto and if I only pumped out one post a week then that was cool, as long as I though it was a good post.

But I’m not really cool with that anymore. So today I decided that for the next thirty days I am going to write a post every day. It’s my little social experiment to see if it will help me get out of my blogging slump.

Starting today!

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The Vomiting Curse

Maybe my recent blogging frenzy idea has stemmed from my sleep deprivation and borderline insanity due to the fact that we’re into day six of Jude and his vomiting bug.

‘Bomit’, as he calls it.

I’ve got one of those three year olds who is a vomiter. If anybody in a 10km radius gets a spew bug he’ll catch it too so this week I have cleaned up bucket loads of bomit from every corner of the house.

He’s not desperately sick, he functions normally and then he’ll complain he feels sick and without warning he’ll spew. Usually just after I’ve done something clever like given him red Gatorade to hydrate him.

Yesterday I was complaining to someone about how none of the other three kids were vomiters, that it’s just Jude. That it was ruining my social life and interfering with the next marathon training I’m supposed to be doing and how selfish children can be with their gastro timing (I mean, COME ON).

Then my memory wound back to 2003-2005 and I remembered how Holly spewed pretty much every day. I think my brain had nearly erased that from my memory. It’s Mother Nature’s little trick to get you to keep reproducing. Sneaky wench that she is.

Straight after Holly was born she started spewing, she was my first child so I thought it was normal but as she got older and drank more, the vomits would get bigger. By this stage they weren’t trickles of regurgitated milk, they were poltergeist style horizontal projectiles from her tiny mouth to whatever was within a couple of metres of her .. many people witnessed her vomits and their chins would drop to the floor.

I would take one look at all the breast milk everywhere and think “god damn it now I have to do all that again”.

We had bath towels all over the house because they were the only thing large enough to clean her spew up and when she started eating solid food and started to vomit that back up too I was ready for the men in white coats to take me away.

As Holly got cleverer, she used the vomit to her advantage. She knew if she coughed enough her stomach would empty and that happened pretty much every night when we put her to bed. She’d protest about bed time, cough a few times and then bam, chopped up mushrooms and chicken and whatever else she’d eaten would be all through her cot, over the walls, on the carpet … all over her. It was incredibly disgusting.

Rob and I were beside ourselves. She had been checked out by doctors and was unfortunately just a chucky baby – nothing more, we were just unlucky. I started to feed her dinner at 4pm so that her food would be mostly digested by bed time but then she’d wake up hungry so it was an ongoing battle.

At the time our two dogs, Abbey and Peanut, weren’t allowed into any of the bedrooms. I only had one child back then and was a bit precious about germs, so they always lived in the back of the house where there was no carpet.

One night after one of Holly’s most exceptional red pasta vomits all through her room, I turned around and the dogs were standing in the doorway. They took one look at the regurgitated pasta and descended upon it in lightning speed and ate the lot.

Every single bit of vomit.

As they sat there licking their chops, rather than be completely disgusted I realised that they were part of the solution to my problem. They became my four legged vacuum cleaners and the no dogs in the bedroom rule went out the window, never to return.

So from that day on, every time spew baby chucked up her dinner in protest, we’d send the dogs in … they’d eat the chunky bits off the floor while I bathed and changed Holly, then we’d put them in the cot so they would eat the bits in there too and then we would change the sheets, put her back in bed, switch the light off and leave.

… and that my friends went on for a long time.

Now isn’t that the most disgusting thing you’ve heard all day?

Parenting: Making parents do screwed up things since the year 0000.