Musings on Vomit

The second child within a week has been throwing up in the house and I've become a bit philosophical about vomit. It's a strange thing vomit. Mysterious. A quick internet search says that it takes about 24 hours for food to go from one end to the other. It should pass through your stomach and small intestine in 6-8 hours. This is all medical fact. Yet, when my son throws up all over his bed at 9:00 at night, I can still quite positively identify parts of his breakfast from 15 hours ago. He doesn't seem to chew as much as I thought he did either, seeming to prefer to swallow things quite whole. He's growing fine, so it doesn't appear to be a great problem and if I only saw the food once, it would never have crossed my mind.
It's when you're cleaning up that you think of these things. In the moment, when they're actively spewing, you focus on your child. Getting them through it. Trying to convince them to aim things in the least damaging direction. Comforting them. Afterwords, after you've gotten them stripped down and washed off, after you've stripped the bed and tried to wad everything up so you don't leak as you haul things across the house, that's when you think: How did my child eat that much? I made them the food, or at least presented it to them, and I don't remember as much going down the hatch as came up. Did we have peas? We must have. There they are. So many of them.
Cleaning has it's own charm. You really need to pre-clean anything that you want to throw in the laundry. If you pitch a set of sheets in the washer covered in masticated chicken and corn, you're going to get out a set of sheets still covered in chicken and corn. It will be quite clean chicken and corn, but it's hard to convince yourself that you could be a good parent making the bed with those sheets. So there's the scraping. The handfulls of former stomach contents that need to be removed and thrown in the toilet. They were always destined for the toilet, those little chunks of semi-digested food. If my son had been more aware of the hair trigger nature of his stomach he might have made it to the toilet on his own and thrown up there. If he'd never gotten sick at all, and given another 18 hours or so, the toilet would have been the final resting place as well. It's a funny thing the fate of chewed food. Anyway, you scrape, you pitch, you rinse things off in the bathtub. You get them as clean as you can before putting them in the wash. Turning back to the bathtub you need to clean once more. My son, his bed, the floor, his sheets, his comforter, the bathtub. It's a sequence that needs to be gone through before the night is through. People say they hate diapers. Diapers are gumdrops and lollipops compared to an evening of cleaning up puke.
Things are better now. Mostly. We made it through the rest of the night managing to hit the bowl about 98% of the time. We made it through almost the whole day with a little eating and drinking, boosting my confidence that it was over. We almost made it to the library. Almost. Car cleanup is different than house cleanup in many ways, but that's really another story altogether.

EDIT: After reading this my wife asked why the post never mentioned that she was up five times during the night emptying the puke bowl while I stayed in bed. It's not that I didn't wake up, it's just that I'm slower than her at jumping out of bed. For puke anyway. I assured her that I'll be the one in the lead if we every have a bear emergency. I promise.