It’s a cliché but you just never know when you’re going to have one of those special moments with your kids that make up for the sleepless nights and the creeping feeling that I really should be investing in Crème de La Mer before I hit 40 so I’ll look less tired. You know the kind of moment I’m talking about, the kind that feels surreal because you can’t believe in a split second your dealing with an outrageous situation and you’re usually, suddenly, very wet. Or it’s the other kind: the sublime moment when your kid says something that’s so honest you want to carry it around with you like a keepsake. Well, Friday I had one of each.

First the surreal: I took the dog to the vet to pick up his pills; he has a nontransmittable version of doggy hepatitis that he got from eating pigeon poop a while ago. Anyway, at the office there were an assortment of four-legged patients panting and their masters waiting for the doctor. Doggyblogger was so nervous that he started to shake. I tried holding him for a while to calm him down but this made toddlerblogger jealous and he got up on the chair next to mine and climbed onto my lap. Doggyblogger jumped off my lap and  proceeded to vomit his kibble on the floor. I got up instantly, let Toddlerblogger stand on the chair and grabbed some wipes from the baby bag to clean it up. But as soon as Toddlerblogger saw doggyblogger’s vomit, he made a retching noise and projectile vomited over my new winter coat and on the vet’s floor. All I could do was grab even more wipes and get down on my hands and knees like a scene out of some post-post-feminist version of Cinderella and clean it up while apologizing and assuring my child-free audience that he never does this. When it was all over and I was walking in the fresh air with the faint whiff of puke on my pashmina I had to wonder, did that really happen?

And now for the sublime: Later that afternoon, kinderblogger was going to the bathroom in a friend’s house. Usually he expects privacy when he needs to do his business but this time he wanted me to hang out and talk. While he was sitting on the toilet taking his own sweet time he looked up at me and said, “You know mom, I just can’t get enough of you.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.