Vomit in a cup®

Ok, so my wife and I have been playing this really fun game recently. Maybe some of you other parents have played it too. It’s called, “Who can avoid opening and cleaning the sippy cups with rotten milk in them the longest?” Or, depending on how long the game is played, there’s another variation; “Who can avoid opening and cleaning the sippy cups with the yogurt in them the longest?” Or, the new extreme version, “Who can avoid opening and cleaning the sippy cups with the water and tofu looking crap in them the longest?”

The object of the game is simple. If you’re cleaning the house, or the car, or the bike trailer you haven’t used since last summer, and you happen to find one of these toxic sippy cups, you try and make it more obvious for your SPOUSE to find but still hidden enough that it looks like you did NOT find it.

Now, sometimes you happen to be cleaning a room together (because you’re both playing another game called, “Who can avoid cleaning that OTHER room the longest?”) and there’s just no way to hide the fact you’ve just discovered Vomit in a Cup®. You’ve been seen either; a) holding a clear-bottomed sippy cup above your head to look for telltale milk chunks or b) gently shaking the sippy cup to detect chunk movement or c) closely checking the drinking holes for that solid, rubbery-looking milk residue.

In this case, there is only one solution; you take the cup to the kitchen sink and leave it there. Begin phase two of the game.

Invariably, during phase two, many sippy cups will end up together either in or next to the kitchen sink because there’s simply no excusable way to clean the NON-chunky cups and leave the chunky one(s) sitting there. After, say, 5 days or so (depending on the number of children in the household and number of sippy cups owned) your kids will suddenly find themselves drinking milk out of coffee mugs, measuring spoons and fine china. Seething resentment between spouses has reached its delightful peak, and gameplay becomes cutthroat.

However, and this is critical, THERE IS NO MENTION OF THE GAMEPLAY. If either of you acknowledges the cup being there amongst the water and juice sippy cups, that makes you selfish, lazy and a jerk. You simply have to appear to be too busy at all other activities to open and clean ANY of the sippy cups. Even if it means staying at work a couple of extra hours when you don’t need to.

Eventually of course, one of you will lose. The dishwasher will be empty and there won’t be any other dirty dishes. Or your spouse will deviously take all three kids to three different birthday parties on the same day and you just “owe” them. Or you yell at one of the kids for something like peeing on the cat and now they’re crying (the kid, not the cat) and the only thing that will fix it is a sippy cup.

So you break down and open up all the cups, breathing only through your mouth, holding them as far away from your face as you can, rinsing them quickly and putting them in the dishwasher. Doing everything in your power not to get a whiff.

And then finally it’s done. You’ve lost. But it’s over. So you start the dishwasher, go lie down on the couch to relax, and there under the throw pillow is another Vomit in a Cup®. You cover it back up, switch your head to the other side, and turn on the TV.

Game on.

I'm Matthew O'Connell, and I'm just sayin'.