Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Question of the Week - How Gross Are You?

Well, the Pumpkin is very sick. She's had a fever for a few days, runny nose, cough and she has thrown up in the middle of the night both Saturday night and Sunday night. She is especially clingy to Mama (or as she is starting to call me, Mommy). She is the poorest of all the pumpkins in our land! I just want to hold her and cuddle her all day and night.

Except of course that I have barely gotten any sleep for the past three nights, need a bit of a break and had to come into work today to get a bunch of stuff done. But I did take yesterday off.

We saw the doctor yesterday, and she said that she is just sick with something that is going around. It's nothing major, and there isn't an ear infection or anything. She's just sick. But she is very sick.

I know we are lucky though. The Pumpkin has been really very healthy overall. This is maybe her 3 or 4 sickness, her second fever ever and the first time she has thrown up.

You know, when I read on Ask Moxie about how parents would catch the throw up in their hands, I thought that was gross, but hey, parents do wierd things. Well, at 4ish in the morning on Saturday night/Sunday morning, when the Pumpkin threw up (all liquid and no food, since she hadn't been eating much), she threw up on my arm because she was glued to me all night. Well I sat up trying to figure out what happened (I was still half asleep). And when I realized that she had thrown up and was going to again, I totally reached out and caught it in my hand. Without thinking. I feel like I passed some sort of rite of passage.

It of course got me thinking about all the gross things we parents do for our kids and even our pets. Which brings us to today's Question of the Week:

What gross thing have you done for your child or pet?

I'll tell you something gross Londo and I have to do for our dog. We wipe her butt after she poops. Every time. If we don't, there is a nice surprise smeared on our bed after she lies on it, and she always lies on our bed. So we wipe the dog's butt and the toddler's butt. Good times.

How about you? What do you do that would have grossed you out pre-baby or pre-pet?

17 comments:

sheSaidC2 said...

I have caught puke with my face. BabySaid's puke went into my mouth and eyes, and I did what I had to as a parent without thinking, I held him close and comforted him.

UG.

we have a puker, we know the early signs and quickly hold him over an easy to clean surface and hold and comfort him.

Becoming Mommy said...

The nastiest thing I've done for Sasha? Probaby be thrown up on repeatedly (to the point I was throwing up) but continue trying to clean him up.

The nastiest thing I've ever done for the dogs...that's a toughie. My dogs are pretty disgusting. There's Kerrygirl's projectile vomit/diarrhea that's actually just blood that I've cleaned off my lap while I was driving her to the doctor. There's the half-eaten animals I've graciously accepted as "gifts". And there's the poopie diapers I have to wrestle away from the Hound that she wants to eat.

I guess I'm fairly gross.

Anonymous said...

Eaten food that has been in their mouths- but not thru the digestive system!!!)

Anonymous said...

Without a doubt, the nastiest thing I have done is scoop poop out of the bathtub after I turn my back for ONE FRIGGING MINUTE! Let me tell you, nothing is more demoralizing than handling someone else's poop with your bare hands. Also, I've cleaned training pants in the toilet with latex gloves, detergent and bleach because I had no idea what else to do with it. I've since learned that those things are not made for pooping in!

I can't believe I just admitted this.

Anonymous said...

The grossest (is that a word?) being in our house is also the smallest - our tiny and whiney black cat. She is 6 pounds of fluff and 100 pounds of maintenance. She throws up at least once a day, usually on something important. She is mainly hair, so she leaves little piles of downy black fluff over everything (Dorothy has already learned the word "fuzz!") She is a wannabe single cat in a two cat household, so she is always pestering our other cat (after 8 years of cohabitation!) And lastly, she has been the hardest one to convince to use the litterbox, which leads me to the grossest thing I have to do. She has consistent problems with constipation, so on the days that she just can't completely pass a bowl movement, I have to help her out yanking the bm out with a paper towel.

Anybody want a cat? She's lovely. I swear.

Cloud said...

Oh, lots of vomit. Our Pumpkin was a puker when she was littler.

The worst was cleaning the vomit out of the car seat. This was fairly recent, so involved a forward facing car seat. I had to pick some bits clean with a toothpick.

I'm Not Skippy said...

I have yet to be grossed out by anything, but some things I thought might be awkward. . .

Handling my wife's pumped breast milk. That should have weirded me out, but it never did.

Getting peed on. . . often. I don't even flinch anymore. You should have a boy.

I've gotten lots of poop on me. Even that runny breast milk only poop. And our son was one of those babies who only pooped once a week, so it was always a blow-out.

That was kind of gross, but it was what needed to be done.

Anonymous said...

remember when we made dog poop soup with R@&^'s dried up stuff in the back?

Anonymous said...

I don't generally catch the puke with my hands but I have been known to "aim" him if I can tell it's coming. God how I hate the puke.

The grossest thing I've probably ever done is wipe his nose with my bare hand. Eww, it's so gross I can't even believe I admitted that. I just can't stand to see a green snotty nose on my kid.

Rudyinparis said...

Oh my God, these are all so fabulously disgusting!

Here are some of mine: like anon @ 12:15 I had to scoop poop out of the tub--just last week as a matter of fact! Oh, it was grand.

Chewed up food, spit into my hand? Check.

Puked on? Check.

When Eldest was about 3 I was doing some dinner prep in the kitchen. She was yammering away to me and I was giving noncommital noises. She was talking about her lipstick. She said: Would you like some lipstick? I absently said, Sure and bent down. She rubbed something of a wet and glossy-like substance on my lips. I looked down and saw that she had a runny nose and had been spreading it over her lips to make a snot gloss. And then she did it for me, too, the considerate thing.

When Youngest was just a month old or so I had nursed her in our bed in the middle of the night. After, I was just holding her on my lap, looking at her, and feeling peaceful. She then pooped this amazing, runny amount that shot out her diaper and landed squarely into the Y where my legs met. For some reason, this was so incredibly disgusting to me that I was rendered speechless. Someone else's runny liquid poop pooled in your crotch is straight-out gross. I woke up DH frantically while babbling incoherently.

Anonymous said...

When Monkey was really sick last year with Norovirus I ended up blocking the puke with my body. He was sitting on the changing table at the time and I just lunged in front of him to try to keep the majority of it from hitting the carpet. Other than that, probably picking his boogers. I can't resist when there RIGHT THERE!

We've done grosser things for our one cat. She's a little overweight and well, can't really clean her butt. So we have to clean it for her.

Heather said...

I hope Pumpkin feels better soon. Nothing more miserable than a sick baby!
I'm so glad to know that I'm not the only one scooping up baby terds out of the tub! OMG, no one told me that was going to happen! We seem to get the same nasty stomach virus once a year since Courtney came into the world. I never thought I would be able to handle all the puke and runny diapers. Funny how things that used to totally gross you out are now completely normal.

Two Shorten the Road said...

OMG. As soon as you asked "what gross thing have you done for your child or pet" I thought, "I should post that I've wiped (my beagle) Wendy's ass."

But you've done the same. How extraordinary.

It's a little bit different for Wendy though. She likes to lick the rug, and in the process she eats my long blond hairs that I shed around the house. Sometimes, when she poops, there will be sort of a poop clinger stuck to a long blond hair coming out of her butt. In the past, she has at times thought a small piece of poop hanging from her butt was chasing her, and she has run away from it.

But since it's attached to her butt, she can never get away.

Shellie said...

Congratulations on passing that rite of passage. You do NOT want me to go there. I have done the same as the commenters and more! Lets just say you may have a few more rites of passage to go.

-goofydaddy said...

puke catchers unite! Ours puked on me once, the first shot was so much it went from my chest to my knee. when i saw she was going to do it again before i got her to the sink, i too held my hand out. very warm. this was the pre-real food baby, so it was very liquidy and mucousy. the first real throw up of real semi-digested food was nice, covered her bed in the middle of the night, she was coughing, choking, gagging, crying on it with each subsequent retch.

to be honest, i'm not sure all that would have grossed me out pre-baby. when I was a police, I saw stuff that should have grossed me out, but didn't.

KG said...

BWAHAHAHA on the dog poo thing.

Um - yeah - Sumo barfed in his sleep one night right around THanksgiving. He then woke up confused. I, of course, discovered (because he was in bed with me) that there was a warm and slimy something under my head. I had to get up in the middle of the night to strip the bed and finally we all went back to bed.

Only to discover it was a stomach bug that he promptly donated to me and to my husband.

Ah, good times.

Wineplz said...

I couldn't pass this one up.

Gavin was an urpy baby until he was sitting up on his own, and Cooper has a tricky gag-reflex, so I've caught more puke than I can recall with my body in one way or another in order to keep it off of carpet or furniture (particularly the couch/loveseat).

And with having, at one point, 4 cats and 2 dogs, I've done a lot of pet butt wiping. The best, though, was about a month ago when our oldest dog, Maggie, climbed up and layed in my armpit while we were sleeping. I didn't think anything about it and dozed-off until the smell hit me and the other dog started running all over the bed, whining. Turns out Maggie had diarrhea under the covers, on my pants-leg, and up the side of me where it presumably trailed behind her to her resting spot. I was irritated and really grossed out, but Justin was just plain angry about being woken up. And he didn't even have dog diarrhea on him!

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