The Choice

Sorry for the delay in hilarious HamannEggs posts. I’ve been up to my ears in bigtime advertising writing junk and stuff. So this story is a little late. It happened last weekend. But it involves puke, so I know you’ll want to read it.

Last Saturday, one of Elijah’s chums had a birthday party at the YMCA. Which has an endless supply of hobos who could double as clowns and pizza servers. Actually, it was pretty awesome. They brought in one of those bouncy castles to the gym and had lots of cool games like tug of war. There is nothing more hilarious than a troop of four year olds with severe rope burns.

After the bouncing and tugging, we all adjourned to the community room for more pizza, cake and cookies than twenty children could ever hope to consume. Can you see where this is going?

At about midnight, Diana and I awoke to Eli-screams. I waited in bed for Diana to calm him down. But after several minutes I realized it was more than just your garden variety ants crawling all over me dream. I entered the room and saw Luca jumping up and down in his crib and Elijah splayed out on the floor. Diana was busy mopping up the biggest barf in the history of barfs. It was as if he asked an elephant to guest barf for him.

Diana then gave me a choice. Tend to Elijah in our bed or wake up early with Luca the next morning.

I had to do some split second calculations to make it appear like I wasn’t trying to figure out how to stick Diana with the worse job. Ok, Eli had barfed. Don’t want to stay up all night with a barfer. But Luca was still in his wake up at 5:30 stage. Don’t want to wake up before the sun. But perhaps Eli was just barfy because of the pizza and cake. But also perhaps Luca would sleep in because he got woken up at midnight by barfing.

I gambled and chose Eli duty. I choice wrong.

Instead of a “I got stomach full of crap” barf, he had the “I have an actual virus” barf. Like clockwork, Elijah would scream out, waking me up out of a dead sleep and then empty whatever goo had accumulated in his stomach for the next ten minutes. I’d then clean him up. Give him some water, rock him to sleep and then doze off just in time to hear him scream out.

Two highlights:

1) I got tired of changing our puke covered bedding, so I grabbed every towel we owned and layed them in a stack on our bed. Elijah would barf and I’d simply yank of the sodden towel. I’m a genius.

2) I woke up to hear Eli heaving his guts out, but he wasn’t on the bed. I discovered him sitting on our floor, barfing into my favorite pair of blue jeans. I tried to extract them, but he wouldn’t let my Levis go and continued to fill them with barf.

Meanwhile, Luca woke up the next morning at 7:30. Happy as a clam.