My son Max puked, on average, once a day until he was almost two-and-a-half. His final shot, as it were, came on a Mother's Day. We ate a fine meal at the local California Pizza Kitchen and, as we waited (and waited and waited) for the check, he tossed about a quart of mucus, macaroni and cheese and other less identifiable stuff onto Barbara. I gave him a bath in the men's room, and Barbara had to wash all of her clothes in the women's. Big fun.

On the plus side, he's thrown up only a handful of times since.

Sam, on the other hand, has hardly hurled at all. He's been much sicker than Max ever was, catching colds at almost prodigious rates. He also tends to get wheezy with the colds, and it might be asthma. It might not. Hard to tell as yet. Still, with all that, Sam hasn't shown much of a talent for regurgitation. Until tonight. In fact, he might still be at it as I write this.

Since Barbara is the designated hurl catcher in the family, she's keeping an ear out for any further spews. But so far tonight Sam has dispatched five sleepers, four crib sheets, three of Barbara's outfits and countless towels (paper and cloth).

His fifth and most recent launch was a mere shadow of the second, which managed to cover the majority of his crib sheet without actually splattering much on the crib itself. Small blessings loom large at times like this.

As with Max, my designated job is clean-up. I clean up the crib, the floor, the walls, the clothes and sometimes even the baby. After Sam's second (again, his masterpiece of the evening), I took a shower with him, washing his hair and scrubbing down the rest of him.

Right now I've got one load of laundry in the dryer and another sloshing in the washer. If he decides to shoot for six, there will be another load in my future. Such is the life of parenting.

If you're still reading this, you're probably the parent of a young child. Discussion of snot, puke, piss and shit and the interesting places children find to deposit them is a fact of life for us. I've collected a number of excellent tales from friends, though our own Mother's Day Massacre (as we've come to call it) ranks high on the list, as are the multiple times Max hurled directly into Barbara's or my mouth. Yum.

And, if you're the parent of a young child, you'll also understand why I'm taking all this lightly. Kids puke all the time. I'm a little more concerned about Sam than I would've been about Max, since Sam isn't a regular hurler. But my guess he's worked out whatever it is that he needed to get out. And if not, we'll call up a doctor in the morning and get him checked out.

I do hope Sam feels better in the morning. He's working on the last of his first molars, and he's been pretty pissy for about a week. But for a kid who's gone from four teeth to twelve in about two months, he's been pretty good. And who knows? Maybe all the whining and crying he did today was just a warm up for this evening's festivities. Hard to say.

Pretty much everything about kids is hard to say. They change much more frequently than the weather, and whenever you expect them to act a certain way (like, say, sleep instead of puke for two hours) they don't. Will Sam feel better tomorrow? I hope so. But it's hard to say.

Yes, yes, I know these little essays are supposed to take some small part of my life and project it into some sort of universal observation. Well, screw that. I spent the evening cleaning up puke, and I think that's pretty funny. If you don't, well, sorry about that. I'll return to my usual libertarian socialist programming next week.

Jon Worley finds puke much more entertaining than the latest events in Iraq.