Tactical Bathing

I haven’t posted for a while, you may have noticed, or maybe you didn’t. There are a couple of reasons for this, one, I have been a bit busy, and two, each day I didn’t post made it harder to come up with something good enough to justify breaking the silence, if that makes sense.

Anyway, I got the job. It’s only part time though, so I think I can still cling to the epithet ‘bum’. It’s very dear to me. I’m just waiting for my start date.

Last night we went out for dinner without the kid for the first time. My folks came round to baby sit. Despite spending the last two nights crying until one in the morning, the baby sittee (or should that be baby sat?) showed every sign of behaving like a little angel in front of them in order to make us look like fools. Lynne fussed about with bottles and sleepsuits, laying them out in easily accessible places and showing my mum where they were and so on, but I couldn’t get out of the door quick enough.

Ha ha! It was odd being out of the house, just the two of us. It really hit me as I got off the bus. It was a little tingle at the back of my brain, as if I had left the house with two bags and had come back with one and suddenly thought, ‘Oooh, I had something else, didn’t I?’

Tonight we bathed the baby. She is getting smarter. She knew exactly what was coming and was red faced and shrieking before she was even in the water. She has learned there is only one reason she is ever naked in the front room.

Lynne almost wavered, but held firm and grimly continued washing the baby down. The baby, seeing her last ally desert her, responded with the only card she had left and pooed copiously into the bath water. It was green. That brought an abrupt end to bath time, I can tell you.

The Quack Of Doom

There is an awful smell behind the baby’s ears. It is a sharp mix of yoghurt and armpits, the kind of smell that is so bad that you can’t help smelling it, coming back time and again for another whiff, as if to confirm that, yes, it really is that bad.

As a result we have stepped up bath time to two nights a week. It seems to be about time. The baby seems to be more inclined to tolerate the bath now; she looks up at me with wide, worried eyes and doesn’t start shrieking as long as she can brace her feet against the bottom with her arms clutching wildly at the sides. That is until she gets her face wet, so we have to wash that last. Then her composure crumbles.

She has a flannel duck to try to inject some fun into bath time. When you squeeze it’s belly it goes QUACK-QUACK-QUACK, QUACK. I’m not sure she isn’t a bit scared of it. Nobody expects that fourth quack.

'I don't like it! I don't like it!'

The baby can’t hold her head up on her own, especially not in a bath of water, so I have my hands under her neck and back. For a few moments it seems that she might get used to the bath, but then I submerge her further and she starts screaming again.

‘Right, that’ll do,’ says Lynne.
‘You’re joking aren’t you?’ I say. ‘You haven’t even washed her face!’
The baby continues screaming. Lynne rubs the cloth quickly round her cheeks and forehead.
‘There,’ she says.
I shift my hands to get one free and splash some water gently over my daughter’s chest. Her eyes are screwed up, little face puckered crimson, shrieking at the top of her tiny lungs. I laugh.

Lynne gets the towel. ‘Come on. That’s it,’ she snaps. With the baby crying like that, Lynne can’t handle it. Me, I have gone all the way through unconcerned and deep into cackling callously. The towel has a little hat in the corner, and Lynne put it on the baby’s head as I lifted her out. Lynne lays her down and delicately dabs her dry. My daughter has stopped making that horrible noise, but still looks aghast at the depth of our betrayal. Then she pees all over the towel.

We had left it ten days; the baby had had only one bath until now, in the hospital the afternoon after she was born. The midwives did that. We weren’t worried about our smelly baby, the community midwife told us not to worry about it, babies’ skin is very delicate and if you bath them too much when they're tiny its not good for them. The West End is full of babies with dry skin and eczema from being bathed daily by fussy mothers, while more, ahem, working class areas are full of healthy, dirty kids.

We have a wee baby bath and I filled it with a few inches of warm water, using my elbow to test it, making sure it was blood temperature, so I knew her dismay at being bathed didn’t come from the water being too hot. I leave flinging babies into boiling tubs to Attila the Hun. I think she just didn’t know what was happening to her, poor mite. Just when she thought she was beginning to work out how things worked, we take off all her clothes and dump her in all this weird stuff. Ha ha, I think. You'd better get used to it. We are going to do it again on Sunday.

Here is a picture of a shark. It's too big to fit in the bath, so it's a pretty tenuous illustration really.