Hey infant - thanks for VOMITING on me

There I was, sitting on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport, happily reading my issue of Sexy Cyborgs Weekly when a young mother and her VERY small child approach me.

"That's my seat," she said (the mother, not the baby) "24A."

I acknowledged her and stood up to accommodate her passage into the window seat that she and her tiny human-ling were assigned. The two of them smelled a bit like baby powder (understandable) and synthetic motor oil (not very understandable) but I thought nothing of it.

The child was a boy from what I could gather. I am not very good at discerning the gender of babies, but the creature was wearing a blue baby-suit-thing so I suppose it was an educated guess. He only had two teeth - the lower, central two.

I have to admit, he was kind of cute in that "I'm-a-baby-it's-impossible-to-not-love-me-because-I-have-not-been-calloused-by-the-evils-of-the-world" way.

So I asked, "What's his name?"

"Jacob," she replied, "he's 4 months tomorrow." And with that comment, the young mother promptly whipped out her left breast and introduced it to the child's yawning little mouth. I was like whoah.

Boobs on a plane.

BAWWWWW how adorable. 4 months. I wish I could remember what life was like at 4 months, considering the simple pleasures of eating pureed peaches all the time and occasionally getting to work a nipple with my gums in a public place. But no such luck. My first memory is of going to the emergency room with a life-threatening case of chickenpox. FML.

Anyway, as the tiny carbon-based bundle of joy was snacking on his mother's mammary glands I thought briefly about Lamborghinis. Just because, well, Lamborghinis are awesome. That thought quickly turned to one of me dieing in a blazing inferno as the airplane's engines roared to life and we lifted off from Phoenix.

I always have visions of agonizing death when flying. It's part of the charm of air travel for me.

About half an hour into the flight I was awoken by little Jacob pulling at my hair. His mother was asleep and Jacob was feeling froggy, apparently. So, I humored him. I let his tiny fingers wrap around my thumb and we played tug-of-war for a bit until something absolutely traumatic happened.

Jacob looked me dead in the eyes, threw back his head, and projectile vomited all over my freshly-pressed dress shirt.

I now had a yellow-white streak of breast-milk-and-stomach-acid solution slowly coursing down my chest, seeping into my undershirt and creating a generally unpleasant scenario for not just me, but for all passengers within a 20 foot radius. The smell was dry heave inducing.

I was now faced with a difficult decision. Do I wake the mother up and let her know that her demon-child assaulted me with an eruption of her breast milk? Or do I not bother, and retreat into the rear lavatory to 'freshen up' a bit?

I opted for the latter. The mother looked quite exhausted and after all - Mother's Day was in 2 days.

So, I got up out of my seat and trudged back to the lavatory, through no less than 20 aisles of passengers...almost ALL of whom were looking at me like I was a homeless mutant with an incurable, contagious disease. I just smiled politely and tried in vain to cover with my hands the disgusting scar of baby yak criss-crossing my chest.

Eventually I made it back to my seat to find that the mother was now awake, and the baby was soundly asleep. They had swapped out. *I*, on the other hand, was wearing a shirt half-soaked in water, with a look of defeat on my face.

The mother looked at me quizzically, as if to say, "WTF is wrong with you stay away from me" and I guess that's understandable.

She had no clue that her son barfed all over my work clothes.

The rest of the flight went well enough. I made it through my trip without much incident, and on my return flight I remember thinking, "That baby is going to grow into a boy and then into a man...he is going to go to college and make a bunch of friends, and he'll likely live a generally good life."

"But there's no way in hell he's going to remember losing his lunch all over a stranger on a goddamned plane flight from Phoenix to Denver."