Sick Puppy

The other night as we were preparing to attend Tiernan’s first Big Time college basketball game, the St. Peter’s College Peacocks vs. the Seton Hall Pirates. (FYI: My wife and I are SPC alumni.) We about to walk out the door, all decked out in our SPC gear, including Tiernan when the boy begins to vomit all over his new Saint Peter’s College t-shirt and, perhaps more importantly, the living room rug.
As my wife makes a mad dash for the cleaning products, I shepherd Tiernan into the bathroom, for another round of reverse yawning. I instruct him using gentle, soothing tones to aim the stream of yuckiness into the toilet. Because he is the quick study, that he is, he soon figures out how to aim his vomit and further mess is avoided.
After he finishes, after a few dry heaves and a thorough face washing, he looks up at me and says, “Daddy, What was that? What’d I do? What happened?” And then it dawned on me that this was the first time that he’s vomited as a conscious thinking sentient being. He’s only 2 and half, and this is the first time anything has forced itself out of his throat since he was an infant. Its the first time that he knows he’s getting sick.
I thought to myself, what a weird feeling that has to be. The poor little guy must be feeling like his body just played a trick on him. He was so sincere, “Daddy What happened? What did I do?” He wanted to understand what just happened and, thankfully, he wanted to know how to make it not happen again. All he knew was something weird just happened and it was not fun-weird.
I explained to him that he didn’t do anything wrong, and sometimes our bodies just get sick. Something goes wrong in our bellies and the only way to make it right is to shoot it out through our mouth. I told him that everybody gets sick. “Even Mommy and Daddy?” he asked. I said everybody gets sick, even Maggie our puppy gets sick.
After that little episode he seemed to feel much better. However, we never made to the basketball game, though. Just as well, St. Peter’s got beat pretty bad.