The night before Christmas started out in such a promising way: we’d just returned from a cool new Korean barbecue place where you grill your own food at the table and come home to a Toblerone fondue. The kids were in their new jammies, had willingly posed for a cheesy in-front-of-the-tree photo and were begging to go to bed so that Santa could do his thing. I should’ve known it was too good to be true.

I was cleaning up the kitchen while my husband wrapped some presents downstairs when my son came stumbling around the corner in tears. My eyes darted to the now-empty plate of cookies and half-drained cup of eggnog on the coffee table beside the tree in our living room, but he was so upset that he didn’t even notice mommy had scarfed Santa’s treats.

“MOMMMMY!” he wailed. “I P-P-P-PUUUUUUKED!”

Did he ever. His new jammies were covered – and I mean shoulder-to-ankle – in barf. I’ve already documented that my son is a horrible puker; it’s like an epileptic exorcism when he’s sick.

Needless to say, his room was a disaster. The entire bed, comforter and pillows were covered in his dinner. Did I mention it’s a queen-size bed? And that we forgot to put his mattress-protector-thingy under the fitted sheet? And that we’d let him cook his own shrimp and mussels at the restaurant? We should’ve been surprised that he wasn’t sick on the car ride home.

The devil's mollusk

My husband grabbed our son and stuck him in the shower while I grabbed Santa’s my eggnog and topped it up with a few ounces of rum. Fortified, I went to work on the dirty bed, lamenting my lack of hazmet suit. Thankfully I had a container of detergent that I’d used in my triathlon days – it gets any smell out of anything – and by Christmas morning he was back to his old self in his newly-laundered jammies.

The silver lining of this fiasco? That my three-year-old daughter had slept in her room for the first time all week. Otherwise, she would’ve been beside him and likely lost in a sea of seafood chunks.

I would do a commercial for these dudes (actually, I think I just did).