Just Keep Eating

I finally realized what the party-hearty Spring-Break college students remind me of: little kids. It’s all the throwing up that comes with the  body shots and drinking games. The Technicolor Yawn, that's what they call it when someone vomits.Just now I was rereading the diary I wrote when my kids were little: Technicolor on every page. In one 24-hour period when our oldest was in nursery school she threw up  12 times between 10pm and 2:00 the next afternoon. According to the diary she was still so miserable that night that we set up a card table in the living room so we could be right beside her while we ate our supper. She snoozed away there on the sofa in her Strawberry Shortcake Nightie, rescued in this way from the terrible isolation of the sick.She’s a big girl now of course and I just wrote her an email to report this fascinating bit of  news from the 80s.She wrote right back.  “Yes, I’m afraid David gets his propensity towards throwing up from me,” she said. (David is her youngest child, age three, while his older brother Eddie is a just-turned seven.) “He sometimes throws up at the table, then keeps right on eating. Eddie freaks out.""Ha ha ha, REALLY?” I wrote right back. I love stuff like this.“Yup. Eddie runs away from the table screaming as you can imagine.”You forget when you’re sitting around deciding whether to read yet another dry article in Newsweek or go start the darn dinner what life is really like for the parents of small children, but old diary entries and news reports like this sure bring it all back.

Part of the time it's like this.

But a whole  lot of the time it's like this.