The Shary Bobbins Approach To Parenting

Parenting is great. Difficult, yes. Challenging, definitely. Rewarding? You betcha. Obviously, since so many people become parents, it can't be ALL bad.

(Allow me to insert a small clarification here: clearly, many people choose to become parents and go to extraordinary lengths to do so, by hook or by crook...whilst others have parenthood thrust upon them by "surprise". The thing is, even if there's a 0.01% chance of getting pregnant, then even though that's quite unlikely, it's not totally out of the question, is it?? So those who say they got pregnant by accident...no. No, you didn't. You just got unbelieveably lucky. You should buy a lottery ticket).

Anyway.

There's a lot of love involved in parenting. And a lot of hard work. A lot of book reading. Helluva lot of chopping up fruit. A ton of cuddles. And, it would seem, a whole lot of vomit.

Luckily, after a few years of dealing with the partially-digested foodstuffs of another person, you get used to it. Sort of.

What I mean is, (and I'm not talking about baby milk possets here, oh no. That's child's play compared to real, actual-chunks-of-food-mixed-with-digestive-juices vomit) the first time I dealt with a vommy of Jack's, I spent the first five minutes shrieking and flapping my hands in horror. After Jackie-boy had spewed on me a few times, I realised (yes, I'm a bit slow on the uptake) that the less time I spent squealing and gesticulating, the less time I would be forced to inhale particles of upchuck.

As a result, I guess I got better at cleaning up my children's vomit (which has been documented before, here, and curiously has become a hotly-pursued topic on Google. Really!! I know!) And the follow-on from this was that becoming the vommittee (that is, the person being vomitted on) didn't really phase me. Well, not as much as it had in the past. Had Christian tried spewing on me...well. I didn't give birth to him, did I?

So anyway, the Mouse has been a bit off the last few days, but I wasn't really that worried. I mean, she's two, she's teething, it's hot, and she's two. Right? It's not like her head was spinning on her neck or anything really scary. We just haven't been getting that much sleep over the last week, since most nights Mais has been crying on and off, seemingly having bad dreams. It wouldn't ordinarily bother us, except for the fact that the kids are still all sharing one room. So when one wakes up, they all wake up - and at 2am, I'm sure you can appreciate my angst.

Yesterday morning, the air was rent by earth-shattering shrieks at 5.54am. I'm sure you would have been impressed with the athleticism I displayed, leaping from the bed (whilst still completely asleep) and hurtling into the kids' room to shush the Mouse before the big kids woke for the all-day activity called "Playing With Really Loud Toys".

There, I was greeted by a very distressed Mouse, dripping in her own spew. Her face, her pillow, her pyjamas, her cot - all were covered in the remains of her vegetables and fish cakes eaten for dinner the night before (and before you ask - yes! There CAN be more disgusting forms of vomit! Fish, in particular, can be very...aromatic. Pungent, even).

Now, I'm no hero. But I reckon I did a pretty good job of staying calm. I stripped her off on the tiles, Christian grabbed a facewasher and a drink of water for her, and together we cleaned her up well enough to climb back into our bed. The poor little bugger slept between us for another hour and a bit, smelling faintly of spew but still pretty damn cute.

She had a fairly quiet day, just playing and sleeping. I thought it must have been an errant toddler-tummy thing, because around afternoon-tea-time, the Mouse presented me with a bowl and commanded, "Bowl!", which means, "Take this vessel and fill it with food, woman, for I am a hungry girl and desire to be fed. Promptly!". So I put dry biscuits and apple slices in the bowl, figuring they'd be safe food for a wobbly tummy. She ate them. Cool.

Since we were due at Grandma's house for a birthday BBQ at 4pm, I chucked the kids, some hats and sunscreen, the cricket set and a salad in the car and expected to be at our destination about 15 minutes later. Silly, silly Mummy.

Half way there, there was a splashing noise, followed by crying (Mouse) and shrieking (Jack and Phoebs, who were also flapping their hands). Covering my beloved baby was a stream of undigested apple and dry biscuits (and there might have been cheese in there too...hard to tell). Keeping (scarily) calm, I chucked a U-ey, drove home, stripped her off in the driveway, barked at the big kids to get over themselves and step over the vomit pieces, cleaned her up, re-dressed her, and called Christian.

Because what else could I do? My poor beleaguered husband had actually managed to escape for a bike ride, and was meeting us at Grandma's house. So in the absence of another grown-up to clean up the mess, what could I do but deal with it? I'd tried standing around, hand-flapping...it's quite ineffective.

By the time the Mouse was clean and calm, and the washing machine was chugging away with yet another load of chunky clothes, we were outside reloading the car. Only problem was, I hadn't cleaned the car seat. Bleurgh.

Dettol wipes took care of the chunks and blobs on top of the car seat...but nothing could get at the bits inside the seat belt clasp. And I kind of underestimated how much liquid had soaked into the actual fabric of the car seat. (What kind of mother am I?) So I'm afraid I used the Shary Bobbins approach to cleaning (if you don't know who she is, remember the Mary Poppins rip-off character on The Simpsons?) and stuffed tissues under the Mouse's bottom to soak up the residue, flung her in the car and drove to where the other adults were.

My punishment for this lacksadaisical parenting? Every time a little bit of sunshine hit the car, a whiff of warm chunder was emitted from the baby seat. It was a very warm, sunshiny day. Nuff said.

We arrived at Grandma's with all the car windows down. And left them down. I didn't eat much last night. Can't blame me really, can you?

So yeah. You wanna learn resilience? Patience? How to do a half-assed job? Try parenting. It's great. Difficult. Challenging. Rewarding. And smelly. That pretty much covers it, right?