Nice work, @schurem! My elder child was very, very pukey until about 4. In the car more than 20 minutes? Yarf. Too bouncy? Yarf. Mercury in retrograde? Yarf. Sick? Oh boy, you know it.
I am very, very thankful that her little brother is not a puke machine. He seems to have inherited my shitty respiratory system though, so we’ve dealt with a lot of croup and wheezing and such, which is the ABSOLUTE FUCKING WORST. I really hated that part of my childhood, and helping my son through it makes me very sad. He absolutely despises the nebulizer, too, so when we have to resort to that it’s a nightmare. Bleh.
Our son used to barf up his milk when he was a baby. He also had a bad bad rash all over. Poor thing. And then we found he had a milk allergy. No more milk, no more rash and no more puking.
Except when they eat something wrong, get some bad bacteriae in places where they shouldn’t go, etc. Toddlers gotta toddle, so that shit is bound to happen. C’est la vie.
Funny thing, in Dutch we call toddlers ‘peuters’. Whereas toddler comes from the word ‘to toddle’ which means ‘walk unsteadily’, yeah? the Dutch word ‘peuter’ comes from the verb “peuteren” which means using your fingers to pry apart or into.
Of course our boy is no longer a peuter, he’s what we call a kleuter (kindergartner). I have no idea what the etymology is for that, tho my guess is its a contraction from klote (expletive) peuter: klotepeuter → kleuter. So that translates to foddler? :P
Last Friday night my 3yo son wakes up in the middle of the night and vomits all over himself and his bed. My wife and I get up, she takes care of him, I take care of stripping the bed, putting new sheets and blankets on the bed, and washing the vomit laden bedding. An hour later we are back in bed and nothing else happens. My son is still feeling sick Saturday morning, throws up a little more, but by Saturday night he is fine. Fast forward to sunday. Now my wife isn’t feeling well and pretty much spends all day taking it easy. We go to bed sunday night and now in the middle of the night my 6yo daughter wakes up and pukes all over her bed and herself. However, unlike my son who just sat in bed crying, my daughter proceeds to walk down the hallway to our room vomiting along the way. My wife is feeling too sick to get out of bed and deal with it so I end up having to clean up my daughter, her bed, and the hallway floor. This takes me about 2 hours to clean up. While doing that, my 13yo daughter comes out of her room to see what is happening and then tells me she had thrown up earlier in the night. Luckily she is old enough where she made it to the bathroom and didn’t have to involve me. So, I go back to bed. The next day I’m at work, my wife and kids are at home sick, my wife calls before lunch and asks if I can come home because my 6yo got sick again and vomited all over the bathroom as she didn’t quite make it to the toilet in time. So, I come home during my lunchbreak and clean that. By Monday night everyone seems to be feeling better. But wait, theres more. We go to bed Monday night and in the middle of the night my 3yo wakes up vomiting again. So just like Sunday night my wife and I get up, she takes care of him and I go and clean his bed, change sheets, etc. This time though, he gets sick again all over our bathroom and bedroom carpet. So, while she is dealing with him I then get to clean all that up.
Somehow, after doing all this, I was the only one in the family who never got sick.
Oh hey, just got a call from the preschool saying my daughter just threw up. They aren’t sending her home just yet because she doesn’t have a fever and seems all right otherwise - I mean, kids sometimes just spontaneously vomit! It happens!
Last time my 2-year-old daughter vomited I saw the signs and managed to get her to go in the toilet. Then, like a sucker, I believed her when she said she was done, so she could then puke all over shirt and half the bathroom. She’s got a lightning trigger on that stomach of hers.
All this talk of puking toddlers has me nostalgic for those times. My 11 year old got got googling for boobs on the family computer with my wife in the room.
Less upset about the boobs than that he is dumb enough to do it with my wife 10 feet away from him.
Because you were far too bad a motherfucker for a couple E. Coli to take your bad ass down! My god what a horror story man!
So they stay dim as a bag of hammers for quite some time eh. My (almost) six-year-old always cracks me up when he tries to lie or cheat to get something like a cookie. So funny. Did you really think that was going to fly little one?
It’s a little funny about how that human sexuality thing is sort of a switch to be flipped. I was flipping channels and there was something, maybe a commercial, I forget. But there was a woman climbing out of a swimming pool wearing a swimsuit, but it barely covered her posterior. My son (who is a month shy of 7) giggled a bit, and when I asked him what was funny, he just said “butts.”
Our daughter got sick a few weeks ago with Flu B, she was out the entire week from school, and the week included a trip to Urgent Care and a night of staying up with her while she puked.
Mind you, she’s 18 and a high school senior. It made me realize that they are still kids, even at 18, and still need you there.
The day after the overnight puking she called me at work, crying so hard I could barely understand her. I assumed it was it related to being sick, but actually – she had found out she’d been accepted to her first choice for college, and she was crying in happiness and relief.
As the thread title says, I experienced the triumphs and tribulations of parenting, all in a 12-hour span.
Late to the party, but my eldest has a mild cause of Asthma, like her old man. Nothing to brutal (I was able to run cross country, if that is any indication of just how mild it really was), but allergies really hit her hard, especially as a toddler. She would get all plugged up at night when she was 2 or 3 years old, and her sleep would be off. This would lead to almost weekly night terrors, which as a parent, are the worst. The scream and kicking, but not being awake. You can try to hold her, but it never seemed to help, and sometimes felt like it made it worse. And of course, she would remember none of it in the morning, no matter how long the terrors seemed to go on for.
On the other hand, sometimes she would just wake up from the night terrors and start vomiting. I don’t think we got through a month with out changing the sheets of the bed at least twice (and we got good at keeping a towel nearby). I think she would just panic because she couldn’t breath.
Anyway, these days (at 5), we are more aware of what she is going through. We have plenty of kid friendly allergy medicine on hand, which we give regular during the season, and if it seems really bad, we give her a nebulizer treatment (it looks like a Penguin). She goes to bed a lot earlier at night, and she’ll finally sleep through the whole night without night terrors.
Our youngest is allergic to Avocado and other similar fruits. That took us longer than I liked to figure out. She would get sick a few hours after eating avocado, and would start throwing up. We had no idea what it was, since it first happened in the fall (when she turned 1), so we thought it could be allegories like her sister or something was off in the house. After we figured it out though, she has been a trooper. Hell, she even used to sleep through the night terrors of the oldest child, which is something, considering how loud and long they used to last, and how the lights would need to be turned on to deal with the vomit.
Oof. My niece had those. All of us (me, my now-wife (then girlfriend), my sister, my mom, and my niece) lived together for a short time, and it was just heartbreaking to see her go through those.
Over time, we found that she would calm down almost immediately when she was held by someone in particular. Sometimes it was my mom, sometimes me, sometimes her mom. Until we discovered that, though, there were some sleepless nights.
Our daughter doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of allergies yet. We’ve introduced her to eggs, avocado, and peanut butter so far, and dogs and cats seem to be okay so far. Crossing my fingers it continues to be that way.
We found out the sooner she went to sleep, the less likely their were to occur. Exhaustion was the trigger for her. Now that she goes to bed on time, they rarely occur. I think the last one was a few months ago.
Just because it’s not always bad, here’s a fun story:
Last weekend my boy turned 6. This afternoon we held his kids’ party. It was lego-themed and we planned games and such around a story about a master-builders’ project that was unfinished. They had to find the pieces, find the schematics and bring the project to completion, proving themselves master-builders. Here the thing is, a glorious Duplodocus:
If the boy looks tired to you, you may be right, we had them run around and puzzle and do dexterity challenges all afternoon. Of course the thing was sort of a pinata, filled with candy.
There was a final game, racing pull-back powered lego cars, before dinner was served in a way certified to blow six year old minds:
My son’s 7th birthday is next month and my wife and I decided we’re going to hire the Seattle Reptile Guy to bring a bunch of snakes and lizards to our house for all the kids to squeal over. Should be a riot.
