Here’s a nice little titbit of information: babies can’t spit. Babies can’t blow their nose or clear phlegm from their throats or mucus from their sinuses – you have to help them do it. It’s as disgusting as it sounds, but if you don’t help your baby clear these cavities it’s only a matter of time until they fill up, agitate, and then your baby paints the floor like a teenager who mixed their stolen vodka with a lava lamp.
These days you can use a bulb syringe to suck snot out of your child’s snout, it’s not pleasant, but better than the alternative – the old school method was to stick your child’s nose in your mouth and suck it out into your own mouth. Yuck. I personally wouldn’t want someone to chew half a vanilla slice and then hand it to me to finish – you hardly get any coconut.
If mucus slips down to the back of a baby’s throat, a baby will just swallow, and a baby doesn’t know how to spit. If a baby keeps swallowing mucus it will fill the stomach, irritate it, and then ruin carpet. At least a dog has enough self-awareness and guilt when it ruins the carpet it will clean up its own mess, but unlike a dog it is frowned upon to rub a baby’s face in it, unless you call it ‘tummy time’.
The good news is that these are extreme cases; most vomit a baby will make is because it has drunk too much milk or has sucked in air, formed a bubble, and has to burp it out. This where you see the little dried patches on the shoulders of parents with babies, like some sort of Adventurer level yoghourt Scout covered in badges. Sometimes these milk pops are small, but sometimes they are gushing and hard to ignore.
Three things in life are certain; death, taxes, and getting covered in baby spew (if you know a baby – the less babies you know the harder for this third rule to work). In the tradition of click bait articles, here are the three worst places to get baby spew:
3 – Your mouth: no explanation needed. This happened to my wife the other week with our youngest child. The whole thing is so putrid that it will make you return the favour – and it’s only the third worst.
2 – Down the sleeve: this feels revolting. You’re holding your child and they manage to slip one down your arm and your sleeves are a bit loose, the magic of surface tension lets the spew run down your arm on its way to form an unholy union with your Rexona deodorant. This one will make you contort in disgust as you feel that drop slide down (up?) your arm. Bonus points if the spew enters via the neckline and still finds a way down your arm.
1 – In your lap: to be honest, this was the real reason I started wearing pyjamas to bed. Wearing pyjamas when looking after a baby is like the tear-away visors for racing car drivers; something quick to remove to enable a clear view of your imminent fiery death. Baby vomit in your lap doesn’t sound that bad but, without pyjamas, there’s nothing worse than getting baby vomit on your dick and turning your pubes into a carbonara.
Russell Hartup 