Do you ever have those nights when you just have a gut feeling that you should go to bed early because the night might just be a little more than usual? Well, last night was one of those nights.

We put Noah down around 8:30pm (in his new toddler-bed, might I add). Matt and I discussed staying up and watching a movie or one of the many shows on the DVR that we haven’t gotten around to yet. But, finally, after finishing the dishes and putting a load of clothes in the dryer, decided we were just too tired and got in bed around 9:30pm.

At 11:30pm, I hear that sound come over the baby monitor that every mother knows. It is the shrill scream/cry that bellows “Come and get me right now! I don’t know exactly what is wrong but something is wrong with me!”

After assessing the situation, Matt decides he can handle it alone (he is the designated nighttime respondent after all) and I go back to sleep. About 30 minutes later, Matt screams up from downstairs, “I need a little help down here!”

I get down there to find my sobbing baby boy, completely non-responsive to any regular means of comforting, just moaning and groaning about his tummy-ache, just rubbing his belly and saying, in the saddest and most pitiful voice you can imagine, “It hurts, mommy. My tummy hurts so bad.”

Well, we tried everything. We got him ice cubes- it didn’t help. We got in the bath tub- it didn’t help. He asked me to hold him (except he says, “Mommy, I want to hold you” and it is the cutest thing in the world)- it didn’t help. We got into mommy and daddy’s bed- it didn’t help.

I finally offered to go back to his room and lay down in his bed with him until he could fall asleep. That seemed to sound like a good idea to him so we left Matt in the big bed and headed to Noah’s room. Keep in mind that it is now 2:30am.

When we get to his room, he asked me to sit on the floor first because he wanted to sit in my lap. (Whatever he wants at this point, right?) I get down on the floor, he looks me straight in the face, and just as he is opening his mouth to ask me a question, the vomit comes shooting out at, what seems like, lightning speed. Of course, I do the only instinctual thing that I know every mother does, I put my hands out in front of him, forming a “hand bucket” of sorts, and try to catch the vomit before it gets all over me.

Of course, my hands can only catch a fraction of the vomit. Also, I am screaming to Matt, “Get in here and bring towels- lots of towels!” The vomit- full of hot dog chunks, cream cheese and wheat thins, and blueberries- is everywhere. It is on my feet, all over my shirt, and somehow it made it like 6 feet across the room. It smells worse than any smell I have smelled in a very long time. And, within seconds, it is overflowing my “hand bucket” and spilling out onto the rug.

Then, hearing my calls of desperation, Matt shows up with the smallest hand towel I have ever seen. (Seriously!? A hand towel?!) He cleans up Noah and starts to wipe up the floor. All the while, I am sitting on the floor, hands full of vomit, unable to move for fear that the minute I try to stand up, I will spill the entire contents of my “hand bucket” onto the rug, even further tainting my baby’s room with that rancid hot dog vomit smell.

So I say in a very impatient voice, “Matt, help me!”

He realizes my predicament, wraps my hands up with a towel (only slightly larger than the first hand towel he brought in), and helps me up off of the floor. I walk down the hallway to the guest bathroom only to realize that the toilet seats are down, my hands, full of vomit, are wrapped tightly in a towel, and I have to figure out how to get the vomit from my “hand bucket” into the toilet without spilling it everywhere in the bathroom and without dumping the towel into the toilet (I did not want anyone to have to figure out how to clean that up later).

Being the incredibly flexible person that I am (please note the extreme sarcasm intended here), I lean far enough over to the side so that I can lift the toilet seats up with my feet, careful not to spill the vomit. I then shimmy the towel off of my hands into the bathroom sink, only spilling a few small chunks into the sink. Next, I shake my hands with a ferocity never seen before, getting every last chunk of vomit into the toilet, because all I want to do at this point is get as far away from the vomit as possible.

I scrub my hands about 6 times with every kind of soap I can get my hands on. I then jump in the shower and quickly scrub my legs and feet. I realize I can still smell the vomit on my hands so I scrub them with way too much hand sanitizer. I change my clothes, and go get Noah who is still very sad and pitiful and complaining about his tummy. Now he is also upset that he got his “carpet all messy.”

We go downstairs and curl up on the couch. We turn on Jake and the Neverland Pirates while he sucks his thumb and rubs his belly. Matt stays upstairs to scrub the carpet, Lysol the crap out of the room, and put everything into the washing machine (I can hear him gag several times because, trust me, this stuff was rank).

He looks directly at me, takes the latex gloves off, and says, “Next time, don’t scream for a towel. Tell me to get a bucket.”