S#!ts and Giggles

I’ll be honest with you, before the mini people arrived on the scene, the most nerve wracking a bowel movement got was when the gorilla’s thumb was poking out and I’d forgotten to get another loo roll before unceremoniously parking my rear on the throne.  In my book there’s no better start to the day than fearing a cling-on only to discover it was a ghostie #OneWipeWins.

Then the inevitable happened.

Let’s start a family…he said, how hard can it be?….he said.

People bleat on about how you never get that time back and how they wish they could be babies forever?!  Who are these people and their pharmaceutical induced calmness?!

Granted, I do miss some of the baby stuff, the talc farts and the time my eldest got hold of a tub of Johnsons, liberally shook and ended up looking as though she’d just crawled off the set of Narcos!  The satisfying snap of the poppers as you entrap them in babygrows and the skull cap crescent of baldness in their chick fluff hair from fidgeting against their miniature mattress.

Already I can feel my skepticism dwindling as a militant band of rogue hormones quickly form, threatening to attack me with a fresh assault of broodiness, but then I remember; the poop!

My god!  Never mind the almighty destruction they inflict upon your FuFu as they make their entrance into the world, we should have known what we were letting ourselves in for the moment that gooey black tar oozed its way out of their tiny poop shoot!

They say you remember your first kiss, the same can be said for your first truly god awful nappy change.  I love the BEP song Where Is the Love and despite the fact I’m no good with geography and aren’t entirely sure where I could find the bloods or the crips, I’m pretty certain I could have resembled a member of either party as I approached that first dirty bomb, T-shirt pulled up over my face, eyes peeking above the cotton neck, fingers curled in revulsion.

Thank the lord for the transition to wet wipes from cotton balls #InWetWipesWeTrust.

Even those glorious clothes extraordinaire can’t provide complete protection.  My glasses haven’t been the same since the nappy change when my daughter farted mid wipe and a projectile chocolate chip violated the corner of my frame.  Despite fumigating them in air freshener and a generous application of bleach, I can’t look at them in the same light as before, particularly when I’m not wearing them; they’re damaged goods.

Let us not forget either, our darkest hours, when they are ill and you transform into Gregory Isaacs’ Night Nurse, reluctantly dealing with the gravy train, even in the ungodly twilight, amassing a pyramid of soiled nappies in homage to the Pharaohs!

I saw potty training as a positive step, a small hurdle to cleanliness; how naïve I was!  In my defence I was a first-timer, I had nothing to prepare me for the onslaught of tantrums and ear piercing screams that such a cheaply manufactured item of plastic could evoke in a small child.

By the end of that first week my eyes had been well and truly opened.  I went from the softly softly approach, trying to lure her with rusks (like the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), to outright pleading.  I had stickers, I had rewards – I even upgraded the model to a plastic porcelain copy complete with flashing lights (which I’m still quite jealous of); but as they said of Maggie Thatcher “the lady’s not for turning”, she wasn’t having a bar of it.

I don’t remember what eventually won her round, but little by little she got over her reluctance.  Admittedly there were hiccups along the way; she accepted weeing into the chosen chalice but played hide the hankey until you’d catch a nasty whiff and turn her round to reveal “the worst case of hemorrhoids I have ever seen” as Ace Ventura said of Louis Einhorn.  Who hasn’t enjoyed a bath with your child only to notice to your horror a floater glide by.  The worst are the sinkers, many a ladle has been sacrificed in an attempt to generate a current to surface the stool as though raising the Titanic.

No matter the delights in store for us as parents we persevere, and I think I know why.  Somewhere deep in our subconscious we know, just as does Elton John, the circle of life will complete and it’ll be them holding their breath and changing our incontinence pads as they contemplate the cheapest nursing home, so it pays to keep in their good graces.

I’m off to buy some Haribo, best keep ‘em sweet.