To Spew Or Not To Spew

I wrote this post back in October.

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What is it with these kids and their vomiting??? It's barely the end of October and I've already had THREE kids throw up in class (not all at the same time) ... in the 4 years that I've been teaching ... I haven't had one vomit ... up until now!

First incident:

I'm walking around looking at the children's work.

Little runt: Miss! D. is throwing up!

I look over at D. She is clearly holding a mouthful of barf. Literally. I tell her to go to the garbage can so she can make her ... ummm ... deposit. My heart went out to her. It really did. The poor girl was holding her gag juice in her mouth so she wouldn't make a mess. Talk about proper vomiting etiquette.

Second incident (one that I found quite funny after the fact):

It's nearing the end of the day. I have N (another teacher) in my room getting ready to take some kids out for resource. As usual, I have a throng of kids surrounding me as I'm standing near the door talking with N. I'm talking to a student in front of me when all of a sudden one of my students reenacts a rendition of the exorcist vomiting bile from her bed. It was full force projectile. It almost hit me, but I was one of the lucky ones. A few of my students, however, were not so lucky. The vomit hit a student's (E) desk and went on E as well.

I tried to remedy the situation by making pukey not feel so bad about vomiting all over my floor and his fellow students. However, when I told the story to my brother ..... I. Could. Not. Stop. Laughing. I was laughing so hard, tears were streaming down my face.

I don't know how hard I would've been laughing if I were a victim and would've wound up having to disinfect and burn my clothing.

Third incident:

Circle time. Although it's not quite a circle and more of a small, yet still incredibly raucous bunch of children practically piled one on top of another. Man are they ever rambunctious! I digress! It's about 9:40am and I'm JUST about to explain our new spelling program when suddenly streams of upchuck are being emitted from a little girl's mouth. Of course she promptly begins to cry (because let's face it, no one wants to bring up their insides ... it doesn't taste as good coming up as it does going down). I immediately dismantle the munchkins from the group and page a custodian (with help from a secretary).

We had a Y.U.M.M.Y. custodian taking the shift of the (very) regular (and older) custodian. OH MAH GOD I almost kissed that child for hurling. Thank you child for bringing in the hot custodian to mop up your vile juice.

If I come across as being insensitive towards the hurlers, I'm really not. I always, always treat their situations with compassion, never drawing attention to it and always trying to make them feel better. Let's face it. Kids can be a tad cruel and I don't want my wee ones to make fun of someone being sick.

For incident number 2, I had some kids saying "EWWWWWWWWWW" but promptly put them in their place by saying, "I'm sure you've thrown up at least once in your teeny lifespan!" Once in a while a tiny "ewww" would come out of someone's mouth in which case my sidekick (a student) would yell at them, "STOP IT!!! YOU VOMIT TOOO!"