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| Hmm, now what to have for dinner? Ooh, leftover Bubmeat. |
"Whoa-oh here she comes. Watch out boy, she’ll chew you up. Whoa-oh here
she comes. She a maneater." --Hall & Oates, yo
So HP has this weird habit that
I’m pretty sure is either helping or scarring Bub for life, you can never be
sure of these things. It goes like this…
She’s something of a biter, but
not any more than your average infant, I don’t suppose. She doesn’t bite
randomly, or with malice—just innocent little nose-nibbling curiousity. Except
for one very specific set of circumstances, and that is Bub getting his diaper
changed. That triggers something curiously primeval in her, wherein she
butt-scoots over to him and just gnashes her two blazing incisors into any
available skinspace.
This doesn’t happen when he wears
shorts, or even runs around in the nude after a bath. So it’s not like she just
saw the stark white sheen of his skin and mistook it for a powdered doughnut.
It must be something about the vulnerability. She can sense he is in a
compromising position. Weak, unable to defend properly. And what she lacks in
dexterity, she more than compensates for with sheer ninja resolve.
It probably didn’t help that the
first time it happened, I started laughing my ass off. I just didn’t expect
that. I thought she was coming over to play. Not snack. So I laughed. Bub
cried. HP screamed. Lots of emoting.
After I collected myself, dragged
HP to the other side of the room and finished wiping Bub, I thought, okay, that
was weird, but she was probably just hungry and unable to express her needs
using “socially acceptable” methods. So she ate her brother. Made sense, in its
own way. It’s like Alive, but without
the plane crash. Kind of.
Then it happened again, right
after lunch. A big, starchy, carb-loading lunch, too. No way she was hungry. Bub
started throwing a shitfit, which was valid. He was an overturned dinghy in the
choppy South Pacific. And she was The Kraken.
As you might imagine, Bub is now gets a little, um, jumpy when diaper-changing time rolls around. Well, how would
you feel if you had to enter the Witness Protection Program every time you took
a dump?
It’s like he and I are
robbing a bank, and she’s the daft security guard. I create some clever
subterfuge (such as tossing her bankie across the room), and she’s all like
‘What was that? Better investigate…’ and by the time she gets back, BAM, we’re
already halfway to the Diaper Genie, hahahaha.
Sometimes she’s not so easily
fooled, though. Then I have to build a triangle of trust around Bub, using my
two outstretched legs and the nearest wall. This is much less desirable for all
parties. Bub can see her get closer and closer and tenses accordingly. He yells
at her, I yell at him for yelling at her, and HP yells at my thigh, which she
just can’t figure out how to possibly crawl over. Poor thigh—wrong place, wrong
time.
Then I have to keep HP after school: "My brother is not a teething toy. My brother is not a teething toy. My brother is not a teething toy."
Yet despite all this trauma, Bub seems
to prefer it to the alternative.
“Daddy, I’m not ready for the Big
Boy Potty,” he announced after lunch the other day.
“Okay,” I said. “You let me know
when you’re ready.”
My guess is in about a month or
so, when HP wriggles over my thigh, violating the triangle of trust. That should make the
Big Boy Potty look pretty cozy indeed.
