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So this is what being a parent is like. This post brought to you by Durex plc.
We’d been invited to our friend’s son’s 3rd birthday party this afternoon. We’re particularly knackered at the moment and Phoebe and me have a low-grade virus that is annoying without being debilitating. We were thinking of crying off and taking it easy.
But what kind of friends would that make us? Hey nobody really wants to go to a child’s 3rd birthday party apart from another child, but if none of us went to them then all our kids would be psychologically damaged by the rejection. But also, of course, my own selfish desire to try and rest up and get well before two days of filming, would mean that Phoebe didn’t get the chance to socialise and play games and get a party bag. We did the correct and noble thing, put aside our exhaustion and got in the car for the drive to Tooting.
As we started the drive I realised how tired and woozy I felt, but it was worth risking the extinction of my entire family in order not to momentarily disappoint a three year old child who would totally forget about the party within a matter of months.
We were maybe 40 or so minutes into the journey and just a mile from the party venue when Phoebe coughed violently. She’d been doing this all day, but this one was a big harder and a bit longer and I turned to look at her to see if she was OK, just as she vomited up a good portion of her lunch. Then she vomited up another portion and then a third portion. It smelled of cheese even though she’d had no cheese. Someone later told me about the science of the way that baby’s stomach turn milk into cheese, but I was still confused as I didn’t think she’d had any dairy. But then we remembered we’d treated her to ice cream. As today was going to show you are always punished for doing the decent thing.
We now had a child and to a lesser extent a car seat that was covered in funky vomit. But it would be difficult to strip her down and change her without making her very cold and we had no spare coats or jumpers anyway. So, so close to the party, we had to turn around and drive for another 45 minutes with a sick-splattered child in the car and go home.
We’d had all the inconvenience of going to a party and none of the pay off. At least if she’d waited another ten minutes the other kids would have had something to remember and I wouldn’t have spent the next hour trying to successfully get the sick and unsuccessfully the smell of sick off of the car seat. Everything smelled so badly of cheesy sick (apparently Americans put the active cheese making chemical into their chocolate - but we are beginning to see how twisted they are so it’s no surprise) that I couldn’t be sure if the car seat still smelled of sick or whether the smell of sick had just seared itself on to my nostrils. I wasn’t feeling 100% myself of course and worried the smell of sick would make me sick, but once you’re a parent you’re not allowed to worry about yourself any more and weirdly I didn’t.
I was quite enjoying this whole thing as a rite of passage. I found it funny pretty much immediately, whereas my wife, who has already experienced a similar cavalcade of vomit, when parenting alone and in the back of a French taxi, was less thrilled. I remembered the times that I was sick on car journeys as a child and my parents patiently and diligently cleaning me up. And now the baton made of child-cheese and been passed on to the next generation. I think my parents hid their disgust and frustration better than we did. But it’s hard to be angry with a sad-eyed child who is covered in vomit and missing a party. I still managed it, but it was hard.
In hindsight, of course, we could have cried off the party and had an afternoon without the hassle of a drive to nowhere and sick with more penetrative power than Alien saliva, but I feel good that we did the right thing, even if we were unjustly punished for it.
