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Vomiting ranks right up there with deep gashes, broken bones and ear infections as one of the worst child afflictions. It is just awful. There is something traumatic about waking in the middle of the night to that tell-tale cough and then splat of a recent meal making its exit out an uncommon passage. I don’t know if it is the fact that vomiting rattles my typically unfazed children and so I’m just overcome with pity, or if it is the drama of helplessly watching as my child turns inside out that keeps me awake at night. Add to that the unpredictability of it which has me taking mental stock of every possible bedding option, lest we run through them all in the frantic battle to get to a receptacle before my child explodes in his/her imitation of the exorcist, leaving the entire family stuck wrestling those last winks from the breaking dawn on a bare mattress or cold floor.

Anyway, we’re in the throws of a stomach virus. The cough came at 11:35 last night, followed quickly by the panicked and scared cry of my 4 year-old. This is the worst we’ve seen, yet, as Will emptied his stomach over the course of 5 episodes and has been asleep since. Needless to say, we didn’t ride on the retired military vehicles in the Novato parade this morning, and we aren’t blowing anything up with the neighbors this evening. Instead, I finished the pirate birthday invitations, we distributed them to neighbors and postal box on our morning run, and we’ll probably try to make a festive dinner, then have our own celebratory pops and bangs before an early dinner. I should try to squeeze in some curtain sewing. (I still haven’t finished!)

Here’s my attempt at getting Will to eat lunch:

This experience has me thinking – I think every family has “the bowl”. The one they pull out to stick next to the bed of the digestively impaired. We have a pink plastic nesting bowl most often employed in the stain removal pre-soak of kids clothes. I’ve seen the in-law’s bowl. My childhood bowl was the largest in a set of stainless nesting bowls. In retrospect, I’m surprised I was able to stomach the contents of food we served in the matching bowls, regardless of how sanitary I knew they were… I mean, those reminders of illnesses past are pretty strong. I’ve held a grudge against Good Company Barbecue for the returned dinner I ate there in highschool for the 17 years since. And I still can’t look at a rice cracker since they reappeared during a bout of the flu while I was in 2nd grade. So the bowl we’ve all got them. I’m pretty sure ours was retired to Goodwill after it’s service to the ill. This raises an interesting question, how many of these bowls graduate to potluck serving dishes when the kiddos grow up? (I think this is a detail we’re all better off not knowing, no matter how many sterilization trips that thing has taken through the dish washer.) And thinking about “the bowl” has me rethinking why I’d ever consider buying a bowl-like receptacle at Goodwill…