What? A month gone by? Already? But I only just went to sleep. Five minutes ago. And it's your turn to write the blog anyway. I did it last time.
C has advanced to sleep blocks of four hours or so. They usually come in the late morning and afternoon, and then she is starrily wide-eyed as the evening rolls around. Come ten pm, there's nothing she wants more than to be carried back and forth from room to room, brightly staring at the walls. Heaven help the man who stops gently narrating this journey, or tries to sit down for five minutes. Or doesn't anticipate whatever the next twist in her demands happens to be.
Meanwhile, F is beginning to grasp potty training. Once she realised that you can't just wee wherever you happen to be, she decided to sit on the potty all the time, scooching it noisily from room to room so she could be near the toy of the moment. We explained carefully that the bathroom was really where the potty lived, so she decided she would live in there for a while and that we'd stay in there, to 'help' her.
So we explained that we'd help her sit on the potty, and maybe even read her potty training book through once ('The Princess and the Potty', a classic of the genre), and then we'd come back once she was done. Every time we went out, there was a cry of "Hjälp!" So we'd go back, and be presented with the book again, because she needed help reading it.
The next escalation was to say we would only come back in if she was ready to come off the potty. And then we bribed her out by eating biscuits noisily in the next room, and gradually she accepted that you could go round the flat in knickers. Every five minutes, she's been proudly patting herself and declaring "There's no poop or wee coming!" like a scatological town crier. Three o' clock and all's dry.
F settled in on the potty again this afternoon, with Bunbun, and after the book was duly read, we got on with feeding C. "Bunbun needs help!" F shouted through, this being the latest gambit to get us back in. Bunbun can't read the book by herself, you see, and F can't read it to her properly yet. I went to talk myself out of this, but only because C needed changing after one of her colossal hosepipe blasts (luckily contained in the nappy this time). I'm not a total pushover to toddler wiles. Just about 45% or so.
"Bunbun is doing a Daddy Stare!" F told me from her potty as I switched nappies on C. "Look, pappa! Look!" Daddy stare is family code for blank-eyed gawping at the middle distance, often slightly cross-eyed. It predates C's arrival, so I can't even hide behind exhaustion. I'm just pretty vacant these days. Wondering quite how F was manipulating the rabbit to produce this effect, I turned to look.
Over my shoulder shot an inch-thick metre-long cable of electric brown squirty poop, courtesy of C. It landed squarely on F's head, coating her, the potty and the bathroom carpet in an unhealthy dose of goo, and leaving an almost perfect silhouette of big sister on the wall.
This was awful.
F was in shock almost immediately, shivering and retching. I was on the brink of tears as a result, V rushed through to help in a panic. C was in the blissful state of abdominal calm that a recent voiding brings, but that didn't last. If we were all screaming, she wasn't going to be left out. F wailed the greatest tragedy of all the loudest. "Bunbun! It went on BunBun!"
Perhaps one day we can look back and laugh on this, the fateful day C completed her poo-hosing of the whole family. For me and V, the greatest shame is that both of us felt the urge to get a camera to immortalise it.
Fifteen minutes of showering, screaming and scrubbing later, Mormor and cousins A and L arrived to play, and luckily this proved enough of a whirlwind distraction that everything got forgotten fairly quickly. Now, in the calm of the evening, I find myself reliving that explosive moment of delivery like something from a war movie. There are still orange-brown spackles on the shower curtain, and indeed, my soul.
Bunbun, it should be noted, was washed and tumbledried by V with perfect timing for bed. She seems fine, outwardly. Perhaps her mental scars run deep.
