April 10, 2012 at 11:43 pm , by Nick Shell

16 months.

It’s hard to believe that my kid is nearly a year and a half and he just now threw up for the first time. That’s pretty weird, right?

Granted, when he was an infant, he would spit up a little milk occasionally. But in general, he would drool more than he ever spit up.

But last Thursday, during a night we really needed some extra sleep because of the drive the next night to Alabama for Easter, we heard a sudden cough, then a [splat!] from the other bedroom.

Fortunately, my son was cool about it. He only puked directly on his blanket in his crib; then directly into the bathtub.

He didn’t vomit on me, nor my wife; at least not directly. And man, the carpet in his room was all clear too. Such a considerate 16 month-old I have.

Just to make sure we knew what we were doing, he waited about 10 minutes after we got him all cleaned up and back to bed before he did the exact same thing again.

Oh yeah, and I didn’t mention: It was all spaghetti.

There’s something about cleaning up the vomited version of a food that causes you to never see it the same way again.

I say that, yet this morning my wife asked me:

“For lunch today, do you want to take the rest of this spaghetti- the kind that Jack got sick from?”

The answer was yes. That was indeed what I ate for lunch today; only I didn’t get sick.

I am Dad; the janitor and the human garbage disposal.