One Does Not Simply Barf Into Mordor

People always ask, “How was your Christmas?” This year was a down year. There are more reasons than I care to relate, but the biggest was having a kid with the stomach flu on Christmas morning. Now, I don’t believe it was the stomach flu, because neither my wife nor I came down with it. That may seem trivial but the kid had three separate bouts of stomach issues across a week, where the stomach flu usually lasts around 12-24 hours. We both thought it was strep as the kid has had the same symptoms without being contagious in the past. But, her pediatrician, Ted Nugent (He looked and sounded like a cross between Ted Nugent and Joey Slotnick with a goatee that stuck out like four feet from his chin), said it was the stomach flu. Anyway, I want to explain to you, in Mongo terms, what Christmas was like for us.

Now, I am going to give you a visual marker and I want you to remember it. It will help as this is how I can only describe what happened.

Do you remember somewhere around the last third of the film, The Return of the King… which had about 14 different endings… the part where Sam and Frodo are stuck on a rock in a river of lava? If not, I’ll sum up.

Gollum attacks Frodo who has given himself over to the One Ring. Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger, which I heard is no harder to do than to bite through a carrot stick. That’s a little tip for you playing at home or in a bar. Anyway, Gollum and Frodo fight for the Ring and he falls over the edge and pulls a Terminator 2 with the Ring in the lava. Frodo and Sam hightail it out of the Crack of Doom as everything goes to shit and Mount Doom erupts.

After high fiving each other for completing the journey… they have an “Oh FUQ!” moment when they realize they are now stuck in the middle of the flowing lava. Soon, the eagles come to their rescue, which was the one thing that made no sense, because they could have just flown on the eagles from The Shire and it would have been a half hour long movie…. But I digress. So, keep that image of Sam and Frodo adrift in your mind. If you are still having trouble… here…

Now, on the 23rd of December, I took my kid out for a bit of last minute shopping, while my wife wrapped presents and cleaned for company to come over on Christmas Eve. The last thing I really wanted to do was take my kid out into the madness that was the shopping mall on the day before Christmas Eve, but she helped pick out some great Yankee Candle stuff for my wife and she had a ball playing some floor projected video game which uses your shadow like a controller as you step on an area of the floor.

As a reward for her good behavior, I took her to Cold Stone Creamery for some ice cream. Ok… I wanted to get some and used her as an excuse to get some. She had a standard kids cup with chocolate and we went home.

After a bit, she started complaining of a stomach ache and ran around the house clutching her tummy and I yelled… get to the bathroom. So, she sat there a good 20 minutes and finally let it all out. Then, before I could assist her, I heard it. I heard the familiar sound of the child spewing used ice cream all over the tile floor in the bathroom. I ran into the bathroom to the back porch to grab the garbage can she and my wife both used two weeks before when they both had the stomach flu… the real deal. It was empty, but we just hadn’t disinfected the can, yet. As I turned the corner into the bathroom, it was too late, again. Mount Doom had erupted… everywhere.

I managed to reach the can over to her as she finished vomiting into it. Now, she was trapped. Not only was she sitting, with dangled feet, on the toilet, but she was stuck in the middle of a used ice cream flow, with no escape. She was Sam and Frodo, awaiting death on the side of Mount Doom. Here, I was, Gandalf, riding in on the backs of giant eagles.

I used a good portion of a roll of paper towels just to clean up a path as I told her to sit tight. Once I got that cleaned up, I could get her cleaned up. She was then told to just stand out in the living room, naked and not sitting on anything, while I exorcised the rest of Captain Howdy’s Pea Soup out of the bathroom.

As she shivered in her nakedness in our living room, I scrubbed and Lysol wiped everything I could. The Christmas shower curtain was now speckled, as were the towels and floor rug we had just put into the bathroom. After finishing my crime scene clean up, I gave the kid a hot bath and called it a day.

This is how I know it was not the Stomach Flu. As I cleaned out the garbage can, I simply rinsed it down in the tub before scrubbing it with Clorox Cleanup and Lysol Wipes. I turned on the bathtub to rinse down the remaining liquid and it splashed up and hit me in the face as if it was that liquid from the cylinder in The Prince of Darkness. I never got sick.

Perhaps it was luck… or a trick…

Do not take me for a conjurer of cheap tricks.