Blew Monday

It had to happen sooner or later. As it happened, it happened three weeks into my watch.

I'd heard the stories. But I'd seen plenty of spit-ups, so I thought it couldn't be all that different. I was wrong.

It actually started yesterday, when my wife got blindsided in a Boston Pizza by a baby barf-o-rama that signalled the onset of what must be some kind of stomach bug. (Babygirl hasn't got the fever, but she's been getting plenty of the flavour.) Later that evening, I got treated to my first-ever demonstration of my little girl's hurl power, courtesy of a triple salvo launched from her high chair.

But even that didn't prepare me for what was to happen today.

It started with breakfast. The early-morning breastfeeding had been fine, so I figured maybe we were out of the woods. Besides, the baby was ravenous, gulping down her rice cereal in record time and now chasing it with so much mixed-fruit puree that I had to heat up three batches.

Bad move. Just after I had scrubbed the remnants of the third batch off her cheek, she lurched forward in that telltale holy-shit-I'm-gonna-puke way, and I was suddenly reminded that John Hurt in Alien was ravenous too, just before the alien burst out of his chest. She then proceeded to show me that mixed-fruit puree looks the same coming up as it does going down. Luckily, she was still in the high chair, so most of it hit the serving tray in front of her. None of it hit me.

I was not so lucky in the afternoon.

After the puree incident, I went easy on her 10:30 bottle, giving her just four ounces. That seemed to do the trick, and by noon she seemed to be recovering. So for her 1:30 feeding, I risked giving her six ounces. And for that little bet, she owned me like a check-raiser in a high-stakes poker game.

She started off by painting her diaper a lovely shade of British racing green. Nothing I can't handle, I thought as I plopped her on the change table. But then, just as I was zipping up her sleeper, she started ulping and gulping in a way that portended imminent disaster.

I had just enough time to hoist her on my shoulder, heading for the bathroom, when she unloaded.

Between bedroom and bathroom, she vomited the six ounces from 1:30, the four from 10:30 and what felt like two or three more bottles' worth of SimiYac™. I say felt like because most of it hit my shoulder and chest in a warm torrent, the remainder dotting our carpeted trail like yellow blood spatters. The smell was immediate and intense.

I got her over the bathroom sink in time for one last gout, after which she looked up at me in the mirror with the dazed, glazed expression of someone who has drunk way too much and is now deeply regretting it. All I could do was keep telling her how sorry I was that I had fed her that bottle.

With the crisis over, the cleanup began. I gingerly removed the baby's barfy sleeper and damn near all my own clothes, and pitched them into the bathtub. Then I tiptoed my barfy babygirl back to her crib, dressed her in a new sleeper and parked her in the crib. Then back to the bathroom, where I grabbed a washcloth from under the sink and retraced the route, dabbing and scrubbing the spatters along the way. As I was cleaning up the last of it, a large splotch at the foot of the change table, I heard a giggle from behind me. It was the baby, smiling and peering at her underwear-clad daddy from between two slats of her crib.

I'm glad she found it funny. You know what? I did too.