Curdled milk.

Since we have been hiding out in my parents' place during our window replacement, Elsy has been sleeping in my bed for most of this period. She has pretty much gotten used to sleeping on this mattress and we pretty much have a routine down pat now: Bath, milk, sleep, wake up in middle of night asking for more milk, she sits on chair, daddy gets milk, she drinks milk, daddy washes bottle, she climbs back into mattress, and daddy goes back to sleep until the sun rises.

The early morning feeding is new - she started getting hungry in the wee hours of the morning soon after we started staying over and instead of listening to her crying out "Nai nai!" for who knows how long, I give her a bottle to drink. Worked out pretty well actually as she is still pretty hungry when she wakes up after sunrise and the dream feed knocks her out for the rest of the night. Mind you, she may do the same thing at our place, but since she's in her separate room, we never hear her.

In any case, she's got this routine down. When she wakes up and wants milk, she kicks me until I wake up and demands milk. I tell her to go and sit in the chair while I prepare her drink. By the time I get back upstairs, she's waiting in her feeding chair and I let her have it. Several minutes later when she's done I take the bottle down to wash while she gets off the chair and climbs back onto the mattress. By the time I get back upstairs she'll be dozing off and I usually have to move her over so I can sleep on my side of the mattress.

So when she asked for milk this morning, it was the usual routine, except that she started coughing while soothing herself back to sleep. This went on for a few minutes, and I also noticed that she was having difficulty breathing through her nose, like when she was sick earlier in the month. It was a few minutes after that when I heard a much less pleasant sound: gurgling. I reached over and noticed that her onesie and vest were wet, mucousy actually, that I realized that she had thrown up her milk.

I quickly moved things away from her, picked her up, and had her stand in the bathtub while I surveyed the damage. The milk had been in her stomach long enough that it had already curdled, so I was fishing out soft lumps of milk curds from the sheets and clothes. Elsy was still going at it in the tub so I had a bit of time to collect all the dirty sheets and throw them downstairs. I spent the better part of an hour cleaning up the mess in the bed, the mess on Elsy, and the mess on me even with help from Maggie and my mom.

So, if I fall asleep at my desk today you will know why.