Son's Mega Vomit Academicles 7 - Hapless Dad FC - 0

So - a week of vomit doom in our household. I'm only just back from Houston and I'm jetlagged to pieces. Ready to crumble. So...what better way to start the week than with a bucketful of vomit. First off, the baby unleashes a few test puke salvos and promptly falls into the "too ill to go to nursery but you still have to pay us anyway" category. And then, then it's his older brother.

His older brother - at the grand old age of three - can at least walk, talk and give us approximately 2.3 seconds warning before the inevitable carrot puree scatter gun is released across the walls, floor, carpet, bed covers, cars across the road and distant galaxies within his range.

It starts innocuously enough - there's a strange burping and rather like a cat hoiking up a furball - out pops this chunk of half ingested apple last eaten two hours before whilst watching a particularly chilled out version of the night garden. Stupidly - incredibly stupidly - I volunteer to stay with him in his bed til he gets better. Thinking this was just a temporary blip on the radar.

I should have known better - my Grandad always said "Never Volunteer". The sound logic being that it was better to be a live coward than a dead hero. But those were different times -volunteering for something during the second world war almost certainly meant a mention in dispatches and a posthumous VC. No thank you very much. Yet - if medals were given out for parenting your sick kids - I'm pretty damned certain I'd be getting a George Cross for my gallantry under heavy and sustained fire. But - like most parents - if we had a medal for every time we woke up with a soiled nappy stuck to our head or we got puked on - well - we'd be on our knees. Metal and ribbons clanking all over the place fighting for a little spare room on our shirts.

So - as I was saying - the apple chunk was just a taste (quite literally) of things to come.

I wake half an hour later with the little one looming over me like some mad crazed zombie undead from the Exorcist. Mouth wide open and the words "I feel Siiiiiiiccccckkkkkkkk...." tumbling out mere nanoseconds before a tonne of apple, custard cremes and assorted chunks power towards me faster than a speeding bullet.

I take an early hit to the shoulders and cheek but I'm able to dive for cover. Just a flesh wound sarge. Just a flesh wound...

I roll and tumble - out the bed - over the plastic roll gate (works a treat! no more floor thumps in the middle of the night!) and I'm gone - outta sight heading for the airing cupboard and racing back with towels, sheets, cloths.

The missus stumbles out of our bedroom.

"Not the good towels! Not the good towels!"

"Ahhh crap - which ones are the good towels?" I start feeling them for texture and quality. This kind of decision-making is next to impossible for a man. Good towels - I never even knew towels got categorised like that?

I'm soon corrected. It goes like this.

Guests get the "Good Towels", the kids get the luxurious so soft you melt inside them extra-fluffy towels, the wife gets the ok towels and I get the sh*te towels that you wouldn't even use to wipe your cats arse. My towels aren't even allowed in a normal wash. A normal wash I tell you! No-one told me about that one either!

All dad washes go into a special high temperature (1000 plus degrees) super incineration wash to combat our evil man musk.

So anyway - I hug and console the poor little blighter through seven more vom destroyed towels (capacity was at breaking point - there was a danger of having to break into the guest towels cache). I believe I may have possibly developed serious arthritis in my left leg - primarily from sleeping on the world's crappest kids mattress ever. And - when I finally give up at 4 am and transfer the puke ball and myself into the spare room - when that in turn gets covered in tuna chunks - I relent to absolute exhaustion and a quesy stomach and sleep face down on my son's own vomit. Whilst he in turn lies sprawled and content on top of me.

Still - I wouldn't swop it for the world. This is what makes us and makes our sepia tinted memories many years from now. So cherish the vomit - cherish the insane exhaustion. Cos it won't last forever and in a strange way - that's just a little bid sad. So I cherish and bottle these moments in time - these turns of phrases that will stay with us forever. Five am in the morning when my son turns to me and says in his most ernest voice - "my mouth's just a little bit crazy".

"Yes. Yes it is. Just a little bit crazy. But it will pass."

All things will pass...

Seriously - I need some sleep

I've spent a weekend mainly drinking beer and lighting a tonne of fireworks far too close to my house. There are large chunks of blackened grass and sizeable craters littering my garden and a skipful of spent munitions that tell me I must have had fun the night before. Arm four men - four responsible mid thirties parents with a lighter and an excuse to blow things up (Halloween is just round the corner and Guy Fawkes is within grasping distance) and add the last crucial element - beer - and you're in for a treat.

Okay - so I tried to convince the missus that "it's for the kids - they love all the colours" but that wore thin after the first half hour. Wore thin when they'd long since abandoned us and headed back inside to watch Monsters Inc and beat each other with improvised torch lightsabres.

But still - we persevered. Despite the horizontal rain, the arctic cold and wind. And it felt good.

I felt alive. Briefly. Doing what men pretty much do best. Destruction!

Needless to say - I woke up with the distinct impression that an elephant sat on my head in the middle of the night and crapped inside my skull - but it was worth it. I also forgot the clocks went back. So did the kids.

Tonight I will sleep. I must sleep. I like sleep...I will sleep soon. But...the children will not sleep - there are other people lighting rockets now. And it's late - bloody late - midnight. "If they wake the sodding kids one more time - I will personally shove that Chinese firecracker up someone's arse!" I declare self righteously. Ahh how the tide has turned...but 24 hours later and already I regret setting a trend to endure for the next 3 weeks.