As someone whose child (now an adult, btw) had a recurring problem with throwing up during landing, I can tell you the answer to the puke question: I cleaned it up with cleaning products given to me by the FA. (I still have a couple of 1C TWA cloth napkins that an FA once gave me for this purpose; she had no laundry bag to put them in, so I stuck them in a ziploc in the baby bag. After I got home I washed them along with everything else.) Normally, after I was done scrubbing it up, the FA's came behind me and sprayed the surfaces with disinfectant. The one time that the seat and seatbelt caught enough of it to get soaked, a mechanic was called on board to take out the wiped up seat and belt and replace them. No FA ever had to ask me to do this; I immediately asked for the products and did it myself. (After we realized it was chronic, I started carrying a scrub brush and upholstery cleaner in my bag, which was much more effective.) What I do know is that during a flight, FA's are not supposed to touch any kind of object that might be contaminated by bodily fluids unless it is a serious medical emergency; this is because they also have to serve food. That's why when you have to throw away an airsick bag, they hold out an open trash bag and have YOU put it in the bag.
Once it was so bad that an AA flight attendant gave me her pajamas so that I could get out of vomit-soaked clothing when he also got sick all over me mid-flight on an MD-80; I was *so* pathetically grateful to that woman. 1C was nearly empty on that flight, and I was sitting in a window seat with DS as a lap-child, with DH sitting in a middle about 4 rows behind us. (It was a last-minute trip due to a family emergency.) DS totally soaked my clothing, my seat and seatbelt, and we had 3 hours of the flight yet to go. In the midst of trying to clean it up, I asked the FA if she could find another seat for the gentleman next to me, assuming they would put him in 1C; I thought it would get him away from the smell and help make up for having to witness it, plus give me the dry seat to sit in. Unfortunately, AA apparently has a rule that you can't upgrade a passenger mid-flight like that, and the poor man got stuck in a middle seat. I felt terrible about it.
Way back when, I used to wait tables at a hotel Sunday brunch that attracted a lot of families after church. We had children tossing food constantly, and by and large, the parents did not try to clean it up. Sometimes they tipped generously when it happened, and that wasn't so bad, but just as often they did not tip, and that was maddening. Flight attendants cannot accept tips, they don't get paid when the plane is on the ground, and they catch hell if they don't make the airline's required turn time. I can see where an entitled parent with a couple of out-of-control kids just might just be the final straw, though I just find it hard to believe that any FA would actually force her to do it. What seems more likely to me is that the FA handed her a trash bag "to put all that spilled popcorn in", and the situation deteriorated from there.
