Vomit Satori

SATORI: A moment of sudden enlightenment, after which the person's perspective is irrevocably altered.

You'll need to know that later. But for now...

The devil has a problem with puke.

Okay, let me rephrase that. The devil has no problem whatsoever with puke; she does it with alarming ease every time she cries hard for a really long time. You know, like, after two minutes. Faster if she has a cold. (Mucous, ew.)

The problem is - well, obviously, the problem is that the devil spontaneously pukes. The reasons this is problematic are several, not the least of which are the ick factor and the clean-up factor, but the part I thought really bugged me was that it rendered us completely unable to do the whole stay-in-the-crib-screaming-crying-until-you-fall-asleep trick. We are not a tricky parenting unit; without this ploy, we've pretty much exhausted our entire get-her-on-a-sleep-schedule repertoire. So the devil is often running amok at odd hours. This leads to parents who cannot sleep, which leads to parents who cannot think, which leads, inexorably, to parents who write semi-coherent blogs about not sleeping.

So you see how ugly the progression gets.

So the other evening, the devil - who had slept practically not at all the night before - got cranky. A cranky devil is a petulant and demanding devil, and when she didn't get her way (by which I mean, when we refused to allow her to sit on the cat's head until it stopped moving), she began to do this charming cry-whine-keen combo thing she does that I'm fairly certain kills small mammals in their tracks for a 50-ft. radius around her. (This is, at any rate, my explanation for the sudden spontaneous reversal of our burgeoning mouse problem.) This sets off instant alarms for me, because I know that genuine crying is right around the corner, and we know what comes after THAT. So a part of me (the part that hates the smell of bleach) is immediately moved to comfort and cajole, but the part of me that has any sense at all rebels at this idea of catering to brats, and even - dare I admit it? - wonders if she doesn't do this stuff on purpose. I am torn.

So this night, as anticipated, she starts crying. However, it's just kind of slow steady drizzling sort of crying, and it seems like maybe we'll be able to distract her. We try. Oh, how we try! We put on Wubbzy. We dance, we sing. We read stories. We recite the entire script of the "Little Bill" episode that follows "Wow Wow Wubbzy", including acting out the parents' parts. We are a two-man Vaudeville act unrivaled in this day and age, but our many talents are wasted on our small, weepy, hiccuping audience. By now, we've also managed to awaken Number Two, who I'm pleased to report has a much greater appreciation for the finer points of physical comedy, but he is in a fine mood and requiring nothing.

So, despite our best efforts, she remains in a really prolonged crying fit. This is unprecedented, in that it so far has not involved peristalsis of any sort, reverse or otherwise. As a reward (okay, as a further attempt to bribe her out of her mood), we realign the complex network of baby gates to allow her to run freely from the living room to her bedroom, which she does with great gusto. The sobbing, however, continues unabated.

Let us pause for a moment here for me to explain how this day began.

As mentioned earlier, the devil refused to sleep the night before, and consequently, I got to see parts of the whole nighttime-to-daytime metamorphosis that I don't really care to witness firsthand. Some time later in the morning, when the day had officially begun (for normal people who have sleep to delineate one day from the next, that is), I was changing Number Two when he peed at my face. Notice I say "at", and not "in", because I was nimble - and caffeinated -enough to avoid disaster at that point. Shortly thereafter, I picked up the devil, holding her, grinning, over my head, and as I lowered her to my face for a big smooch, she sneezed. HARD. With... um... projectiles. *shudder* At lunchtime the cat attempted to hack up a hairball. I'm not going to say he was aiming directly for my foot; perhaps that was merely coincidence. But I began to sense a general trend for the day involving body functions and the trajectories of their attendant fluids which unsettled me.


So: back to the devil. I follow her down to her room. She is playing, but still crying. Nothing is pleasing her. All her toys are conspiring, her body language suggests, to purposefully piss her off. She stomps her feet. She whines through her tears. She starts to hurl objects in a most unattractive way sure to get her banned from debutante balls later in life, and I feel I must intervene, if only I can figure out how. Having pretty much done every thing I can think of to jolly her out of this, and being unable to identify any reason for this endless spate of tears, I finally resort to what we call "concentrated luvin", and I scoop her into my arms to reassure and soothe her.

WRONG.

She immediately launches into a series of screaming howls, struggling mightily against my interference, and begins wailing hysterically, as if instead of hugging her, I had clutched her with arms slathered in, say, battery acid. I am, at this point, sitting in her pretty pink wing chair, with my feet on her brand new rug.

You know, of course, why I'm mentioning this.

She begins to vomit. And vomit and vomit and vomit and vomit. Paroxysms of puke! And I, in what may well be my most graceful move of the month, somehow manage to sweep her gently over my arm in such a way that she does NOT puke on me, herself, the chair, the table next to us, the ottoman by my feet, or the new rug. NOTHING! She gets bare floor and nought else. And I...

...I find myself full of a small but very, VERY definite sense of satisfaction at this accomplishment.

And there it is, my moment of Satori. My life has been reduced to this: that my greatest satisfaction in an entire, irreclaimable day comes from properly aiming a puking child.

I suspect this would be a good year to make sure my New Year's Resolution involves increasing my alcohol consumption.