The worst sound in the entire world is this: a child’s sudden whimper, followed by a violent spray of projectile vomit splashing on a tiled bathroom floor.
I was just lounging on the bed, enjoying the snow falling thickly outside the window of our cozy hotel room. We’d just had some popcorn and watched a movie and were ready to tuck into bed early on the first night of our family mini-vacation in Leavenworth this weekend. And then that happened.
To all the people who say, That’s why I’m not having kids -- I kind of get it. I do. I actually remember watching a poor boy throw up his lunch in the cafeteria when I wasn’t much older than my own daughter and feeling so nauseated that I wondered, at the tender age of eight, whether I had it in me to ever clean up someone else’s vomit. It’s horrible. And as a mother who has caught more puke in her bare hands than she cares to think about, I can tell you that it’s still horrible, but when it’s actually happening I don’t really have time to worry about that. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever caught your child’s puke in your hands and felt triumphant for sparing the carpet. Right? You know what I’m talking about.)
So when I heard that first splash, I vaulted out of bed and landed squarely in front of the bathroom door. My poor little son was sitting on the toilet, which is why the next spray of vomit -- oh, we weren’t done! -- narrowly missed my feet. I’ll tell you what it didn’t miss: pretty much every inch of the floor, his pajamas, his underwear, the bathroom door, and the side of the tub. He looked at me with wild-eyed panic.
“It’s okay, Buddy,” I said, hoping I sounded both cheerful and soothing. “It’s okay. We’ll clean it up. Let’s get you in the tub.” I stripped off my own pajama pants and tossed them on the bed. I’d only packed one pair, and I was going in. I managed to grab a couple of towels from the rack above the toilet and drop them onto the floor before I stepped into the bathroom, turned on the faucet to the tub, and lifted my son off the toilet seat. Suzannah had scuttled in horror to the other side of the hotel room, and Matt headed down to the front office for more towels. (The twenty-year-old kid working the front desk seemed hesitant to give us more than our “fair share” of towels and suggested that maybe we should take our kid to the doctor. I shouldn’t be so hard on him, but I am still rolling my eyes two days later. Look, kid, I’m sorry about the towels, but I feel pretty good about the fact that I cleaned that bathroom well enough so that the housekeeping staff wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss the next day.)
I tell you what, it was a good idea to bring along a sleeping bag. Last summer, the first time we stayed in a hotel without bringing along a Pack ’n Play, we thought the kids might peacefully share a bed. They seemed excited about it, but they were, predictably, all up in each other’s business, and then Isaac decided he wanted to “camp” on the floor anyway. I thought it might not be a bad idea to have that kind of back-up along this time, too. This time, though, it was because Suzannah was not about to share a bed with someone who had the potential to throw up on her, and I wasn’t wild about the idea myself. We made Isaac a nest on the floor next to the bathroom with his sleeping bag and a towel and the trash can right next to his head.
He was pretty brave about the whole thing, and we hoped it was a fluke -- the result of too much greasy food, maybe, combined with an afternoon of crazy sledding and excitement and no nap in the car and whatever please please God let it just be a fluke please. He said his tummy felt better after that, and so we tucked him in and I laid down myself, tense as a board. Not five minutes later, it happened again. This time I was listening for it, though, so I managed to hoist him over the trash can in time to catch almost all of it. His second pair of pajamas wasn’t so lucky, so he spent the rest of the night in sweatpants.
“Well,” I said to my husband, feeling rather hysterical, “I guess every family needs a vacation story like this.”
Ever since our entire family came down with a stomach bug at the same time a couple of summers ago, I panic at the thought of it happening again. I forget that most of the time, a child throwing up doesn’t mean doom for everyone. Kids puke. For the rest of the weekend I asked Suzannah how she was feeling so often that I got on her nerves. “Mom, I’m fine,” she said. “I feel perfectly fine. I feel great.”
But the night was rough. Suzannah decided to sleep on the bed farthest from the bathroom -- the bed Matt and I had originally claimed -- and Matt and I took the bed closest to Isaac. I’m the one with the sensitive hearing, though, so every time I sensed a change in Isaac’s breathing I would leap out of bed and haul him upright, holding him under the armpits over the trash can before he’d woken up enough to realize he was gagging. By midnight he was heaving pitiful dribbles of bile. He barely woke up for it; still, I had him drink a bit, even knowing he’d throw it all back up. Finally he was sleeping for an hour or two at a time. I crawled into bed with Suzannah, who seemed less disturbed by my constant jumping out of bed. She only woke once, to sit up and say, “Is Isaac throwing up again? That’s like five times.”
I slept restlessly, achy with tension and queasy myself, but when we all woke up for good Isaac was thirsty enough to gulp some Gatorade -- which stayed down -- and everyone else seemed hungry for breakfast. My husband has a deep love for continental breakfasts with waffle makers, and Suzannah goes crazy for mini muffins and all the kinds of cereals we never buy but hotels always seem to have. After I’d had toast and eggs and some coffee, I allowed myself to feel a little optimistic.
And we did have a lovely weekend. Leavenworth was so beautiful in the snow, which fell steadily all day when we arrived. Matt took the kids sledding in the center of the village while I wandered around, snowflakes catching in my eyelashes. We ate pizza in a cozy restaurant and enjoyed the last weekend of the Christmas lights twinkling in the center of town. I supported the local independent bookstore, naturally, and drank a lot of hot chocolate. On Sunday afternoon, Matt went snow-shoeing while the kids and I napped at the hotel; later, we all swam in the hotel pool. Our second night was infinitely more restful than the first, although in the interest of minimizing drama I slept with Suzannah and Matt slept with Isaac (and as it turns out, both of our children hog all the covers).
I didn’t care so much what we did this weekend, truthfully. I just wanted us to get away together. And even if it included a sleepless night and an upset tummy, as well as inching over an icy mountain pass and terrible roads on the way home, I’d do it all again. Last night, as we watched Up on some Disney movie channel and the kids piled on top of me and we looked out the window at the snow, which had started to fall again, I thought about how lucky I was to be in this warm little room with all of my favorite people in the world, about how crazy we can all drive each other, about how we’re all in each other’s faces all the time and about how a slightly different setting -- a hotel room in a little mountain village instead of, say, our family room -- can make that seem so perfect.
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