Living LaFarge

Or,
Why you give baby a bath after she’s pooped in her diaper

Warning: possibly objectionable reading ahead. If you’re not sure, re-read the subhead above to see if you think you want to read on…
It’s Sunday! And about time we gave Anna a bath. It’s been a week, and it seems like we should clean out the little crannies of her tiny self. We tried last night with a wipe, and it was clear that, really, the only way to get her to open up those arms and legs is to get her into a bath.
So this morning I had a quick shower and cleaned out the tub a little (can’t have a dirty bath for her) and then filled up the water, checked its temperature w/ the meat thermometer and made sure it was just about 100¬?. Erika undressed Anna and then handed her over to me, and joyous bathing commenced. Erika went off to cook up some pancakes for breakfast while I idled away with Anna in the bath.
Life was great, life was sweet‚Äîwhen you’re bathing your baby daughter you don’t have many cares in the world, except for making darn sure you don’t let go of her head. I swished her around, she surveyed the world with her bright eyes … it was pretty much like her first bath, which is to say lovely.
Today was to be the first day we actually washed her with a little baby shampoo, but she had other ideas. I had just decided it was time to finish up the bath by cleaning her, when she decided she was relaxed enough to push another meal through her bowels.
All of a sudden the bath was FILLED with tiny‚Äîand not so tiny‚Äîparticles not unlike French’s mustard, with the exception that I wouldn’t worry about either of us being covered with mustard. Okay, that would be a little weird, perhaps, but not quite as, um, evocative as this was.
I held Anna out of the now-sullied water while Erika came in to get her. She then had to clean Anna off the usual way (with wipes) while I dealt with cleaning myself and the tub.
We finally feel that she’s clean, but this time around, the bath seemed accomplish not so much the cleaning of skin as the efficient spreading and coating of the baby’s entire lower body with That Which We Labor So Hard To Remove.
Let this be a lesson to us all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 at 1:52 pm and is filed under life as we know it, anna. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.