A fistful of suds

Something has happened to our little girl. Our demure, blue-eyed Darcey has turned into the thing from the baby room; the thing that will not be thwarted; the thing that must satisfy its every whim - immediately! Without delay! Now, damn it, NOW!

I think it started when she began to eat soapsuds. Her determination to shove them in her mouth was equalled only by her determination to scream like a stuck pig if she was denied her bath-time bubbles. My wife blamed my penchant for the wrestling channel during Darcey’s play-time in the lounge, and I hate to admit it, her theory holds some water.

Darcey has learnt some cunning manoeuvres in the past few months though at this point, she has yet to launch a body slam off the top rope. Nonetheless, we have been subjected to the lip grip, the nose nip, the hair rip, the eye scratch (those little nails are unbelievably sharp), the drool pool and the totally unpredictable, coffee snatch.

The guttural sounds and squeals accompanying these terrifying attacks are many and varied, though the coffee snatch (a one-off manoeuvre that has since been outlawed) was executed with stealth and surprising speed.

On the change table, the groin kick and the loaded nappy are Darcey’s standard manoeuvres. After the first kick, you rarely get caught by the second, but the loaded nappy - particularly the kiwi-fruit surprise - never fails to bring tears to the eyes.

The kiwi-fruit’s insidious black seeds are indestructible and their ability to find their way into every nook and cranny of our baby’s little body is a mystery. Similarly, the ability of mashed butternut pumpkin to look exactly like mashed, butternut pumpkin after a two-day journey through Darcey’s digestive tract is also a mystery.

Meanwhile, some things tend to be more engrossing than mysterious. Take spinach for instance. Among the foods we fed our daughter during her early journey into solids was a little bit of Popeye’s favourite food.

We soon discovered, however, that the iron-rich fodder had taken a fiendish grip on her system and within a couple of days our Two-Tooth Terror had morphed into the Constipation Kid.

I've seen a few things in my time, but the look on Darcey's face as she struggled to off-load her spinach was one of the most absorbing spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. I liken it to someone doing the clean and jerk and the Maori Haku at the same time.

But while Darcey struggled with the spinach, I struggled with the tomatoes in the garden. I had never grown tomatoes before - nor had I been remotely interested in gardening (perhaps I was searching for the answers to life in the bottom of a bag of potting mix?).

Whatever the reason, as summer approached and Darcey grew, I felt a compelling desire to produce tomatoes that were rich in colour and flavour and actually tasted like tomatoes before someone turned them into those orbs of red rubber they sell in supermarkets today.

Looking back on it now, I thing it’s possible I was working up to my first big pronouncement as a father: “Those things in the shop aren’t tomatoes, Darcey, THESE are tomatoes.” And with that I would plop down the biggest, plumpest, most beautiful tomatoes ever seen on the face of the earth.

However, things were not quite going according to plan. The lower branches of my tommies were turning yellow and the leaves were dropping off. I decided to call my father for an in-depth discussion. His response:  “Lay off the watering, mate. You’re overdoing it”.

And so I was. Despite my best intentions, I was smothering my tomatoes. Of course, I immediately decided this was an allegory for life, so I announced to Kate that I would no longer change Darcey’s nappies due to my newfound ‘hands-off” approach. Her look – somewhat similar to the one Darcey uses for the spinach ritual - and the way in which she said “you must be joking”, immediately led me to conclude that, of course, I was only joking.

And so, although my tomatoes are doing well, my encounters with the dreaded kiwi-fruit surprise continue unabated. The tortuous lip grip has never been more tortuous, the rugged hair rip, never more devastating, the dreaded drool pool, never deeper.

Only the music box soothes the beast. As the ballerina turns and the music winds down, the Two-Tooth Terror becomes Darcey the Demure, and slowly, ever slowly, she descends into a deep, deep sleep of beautiful peace and angelic repose. In the silence that follows, a little voice in my head makes a mental note:

Bring on tomorrow, it says, let the Two Tooth Terror return. I’m rrrrrrready to rrrrrrrumble.

by Bruce Atherton

This article was first published in Australian Family Magazine, March 2003.