The ‘Reacher’ star gleaned some parenting wisdom from a very messy moment.

ALAN RITCHSON MIGHT have become synonymous with the character of Jack Reacher in the pop culture sphere, but at home he’s better known as “Dad,” and is far more likely to be found mopping up vomit than fist-fighting bad guys.

Ritchson and his wife Cat have three sons together, and in a recent Instagram Reel while cleaning the car after the kind of puking incident that will be familiar to anyone with kids, the actor shared something that he’s learned about fatherhood.

“I’m just going to include you in this insanity, because this is real life,” he began. “We had a boy get sick in the car yesterday. We are prepared for the worst, we have barf bags in the car, and one of the boys handed the other boy a barf bag when he was wailing about how he’s going to get sick, and he was putting so much energy into crying about being sick that he never opened the barf bag, and so here we are.”

Far from being annoyed, Ritchson appeared to be cleaning up the vomit in good humor as he continued with his story.

“Here’s why I’m telling you about this,” he said. “I grew up in a different era where my father, and I love him, God love him, we didn’t have much… There was a lot of pride in the vehicles that we had, right?

And so we’d have beat-up old ’64 Chevy Novas or whatever, and if we got anywhere near, God forbid we were playing basketball on the driveway and a basketball got away from us and almost touched the car, we’d get our head bitten off. And I love my old man, I ain’t saying anything against him. Different times. But it took everything in me not to lose my mind, because he had a barf bag in his hand, and covered our Escalade in vomit.”

 

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A post shared by Alan Ritchson (@alanritchson)

A post shared by Alan Ritchson (@alanritchson)

The lesson here, he added, and one that he shared with his son, was this: “We cannot let our material things, that can be cleaned with a little Simple Green, get in the way of an opportunity to love on those who are puking. So I just want to throw that out there. Just remember, dads, don’t get mad if something happens to your car, it’s not that important.”