Cool and puke do NOT mix

Everyone knows that becoming a parent changes you, often in ways you never expect. First of all, whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not, once you have a kid, you are no longer cool. It just doesn’t happen. You can try and hang onto it, try and tell yourself and others, “Hey, I’m still the same cool guy I was before,” but no, it’s gone. All of it. The only thing to do is to reinvent yourself as a different kind of cool. You know the kind of cool where you know all the lyrics to Laurie Berkner and High School Musical songs. “Nick Jr. cool.”

Still the thing that changes most once you become a parent, is your level of tolerance for gross things. You obviously have to get past a normal person’s gag reflex since you’ll be changing about nine thousand diapers per week. But it doesn’t stop there. What ends up happening is that grossness actually becomes a matter of convenience. That’s why you see mothers upending their infants, putting a nose to their diaper and sniffing. It’s just faster and easier to smell for poop than it is to undo a onesie, pull back the Huggies and check to see if there’s something inside. When you see a dad pick a booger out of his toddler’s nose, the ick factor is simply more convenient than searching the house for one of those little bulb suction thingies—which said toddler probably hid inside the VCR anyway. This elevated yuck threshold obviously goes hand-in-hand with the loss of coolness I mentioned, because you simply cannot be cool while sniffing a person’s butt on a daily basis. It just doesn’t happen. Ever seen George Clooney sniffing for poo? I rest my case.

But this grossness thing recently reached new levels of abominableness when my entire family became sick with the flu. On one of those fun-filled nights my one-year-old threw up on Lauren. But he didn’t just throw up on her. He threw up on her while he was nursing. You get that? He threw up… on her breast. This wasn’t just some relatively harmless baby spittle either. This was full on, chunky, stomach flu ralphage. And do you know what Lauren’s response was? After her initial, knee-jerk, “aw gross” reaction, she quickly composed herself and said, “Okay, well at least it didn’t get on the couch.”

The couch? She has vomit on her naked breast and yet she’s happy because it didn’t get on the couch? That’s how far we’ve come as parents—getting thrown up on has somehow become the preferable alternative to something else. When the heck does that happen anywhere else in life? Short of getting killed by an axe-wielding psychopath, how is getting thrown up on not the worst possible outcome of any social situation? I mean imagine you’re walking through the ethnic foods section of the supermarket and some guy just walks up and blows chunks all over you—lifting up your shirt and exposing your chest before doing so of course. Could you ever find a silver lining in that? Yet somehow, as a parent, having somebody puke all over your bare naked BOOBS is actually seen as a somewhat positive thing!

Man, I really hope my kids grow up to be rockstars because it would be a shame for them to siphon so much coolness out of me and Lauren and not put it to good use.