The academy award for vomiting goes to...

I have three children. Two of the three children, the eldest and youngest, are expert vomiters. My oldest, Elle, has been able, from a very young age able to sense that she is feeling sick that it might result in her vomiting, and gets herself to either the bathroom or the kitchen sink and vomit neatly into a receptacle from which the vomit is easily removed. I applaud her for vomiting into the garbage disposal.

If she has been ill for some time, she will lie, Camille like, with a bucket beside her bed, and quietly and effortlessly be sick into the bucket without a single bit of spew spilling out of it. My youngest, Harry, is not quite that good, but almost as good, but fortunately has never been sick very often.

My middle child, Billy, however is completely different. If there is a way of vomiting to cause the most carnage in the house, he will find a way to do it. He has been known to stand at the door of his bedroom and say to me 'mum, I feel sick'. And as I am yelling at him to 'quick, go to the bathroom', he will stand and vomit on the carpet in the hallway, take three steps, vomit again, take another three steps and vomit again. This happened once, the afternoon of the morning in which I had spent several hundred dollars having the carpets shampooed. That night, I set him up in bed with six towels laid out over the side of the bed and on the floor beside the bed with the largest, widest receptacle I could find on the towels on the floor, and said to him 'if you feel sick during the night, just roll over and vomit into the bucket'. I heard him calling out in the night and went up to his room to find that sure enough he had rolled over to be sick, but had rolled in the opposite direction and had vomited down the wall on the other side of his bed. And onto the trundle bed underneath. He got his own bed, the trundle, the wall, the carpet, and various books and toys that had been MIA down the side of his bed. I stood there expecting some sort of TV show cameraman to appear from out of nowhere to film this scene for a comedy TV show. And wishing a fairy would appear to help me clean up the mess.

But the night that took the cake was the night this family will never forget. It went down in vomiting history. We call it the Night of the Long Spew. We had been to the local Italian restaurant for dinner to celebrate the end of yet another school term. Billy always asked for the spaghetti carbonara, and he always thought he would be able to finish the entire serve, which is enormous, and had never been successful. This particular night, he ate more than usual, and it was not until the end of the meal that I realised that he had four cans of Fanta as well. This was never going to end well. As we were all walking to the car, i noticed that he did not look well. I asked him if he was all right. He said he felt a bit sick. I turned to The Lawyer, and said 'I think Billy is going to be sick'. The Lawyer said that it was a short drive home and he would be all right. He's not normally like that. He normally assumes the worst. This has now been confirmed as the appropriate position to take

Meanwhile, my mother's intuition overtook my usual optimism and I had a baaad feeling about this. A Very Bad Feeling. We all got in the car with Billy leaning against the window, looking greener and greener. We had not gone 100 metres from the restaurant when he sat bolt upright and said 'I am going to be sick. I'm going to be sick'. The Lawyer shouted 'wind down the window'. As Billy pressed the automatic button to get the window down, he vomited into the glass, all the while holding his finger on the button, so that as the window slid down into the internals of the car door, the vomit went with it or overflowed into the car. The other two children started gagging because of the putrid smell. I started shouting at The Lawyer to drive faster to get home as fast as he could, but resisting the overpowering urge to do something violent for not listening to me. Again Billy said he was going to be sick again. The Lawyer shouted at him to lean his head out the window. He did this and vomited again. This time, it smeared down the outside of the car along the back window and onto the car travelling beside us.

By this time, I was also gagging. We got home, all five car doors opened. I raced Billy into the bathroom and put him under the shower fully clothed to remove the smell and remains of his dinner from his clothes and hair. The other two children ran to their rooms and slammed the doors shut. I stayed in the bathroom with Billy for some time to make sure he was all right. When I came out of the bathroom 15 minutes later, I went outside and The Lawyer was still standing outside, staring at the car still with all five doors open. Bits of Billy’s dinner were still dripping from the inside of the car. He looked at me and said 'well, I guess that’s settled then. We have to sell the car'. AMFYOYO