We are just two weeks away from the birth of our daughter, and my son is making sense of it through dinosaurs. Namely by playing with four triceratopses, roughly equivalent to our own family unit: a large one, Daddy, a slightly smaller one, Mummy, a quite small one, him, and then another very small triceratops, which he calls ‘baby’. He repeats the words we say to him, or the baby, to these dinosaurs, and brings them with him everywhere he goes, most especially for bathing.
I say bathing, but our new house doesn’t have a bath, offering instead a free-standing shower that is extremely – almost alarmingly – large. Seriously, I’ve been to folk gigs in smaller spaces, and its fully enclosed glass door means several people could happily use it at once. Perhaps this was its intended purpose, as a convivial solution to the pain and boredom of showering alone. Why submit to the drudgery of breaking off conversations just because you’ve started to smell, the architect probably thought, when you can invite your poker buddies in for a scrub with you?
While I’ve not yet mined its potential as a hospitality suite, or renting it out as a gig space, I have hosted one person there several times, and quite against his will. Its size has made it logisitically easier for my son and I to fit together for his now-entirely euphemistically named ‘bath times’ but, sadly, its comforts end there.
The first time we tried it, he acted as if I was preparing him to be eaten, horrified that the serene joys of rubber ducks and soapy bubbles had been replaced with the decidedly less comforting image of his large, awkward, naked father pointing a showerhead at him in a glass box the size of Hampstead Heath. He ran to the far wall – it took him a few minutes – and cowered like one of those inmates being deloused at the beginning of The Shawshank Redemption. ‘It’ll just be a minute, pet,’ I assured him as I pelted him with lukewarm water.
I quickly realised the best way to get him to endure this process is to periodically give him control of the showerhead, to allow him to spray me to his heart’s content, while I surreptitiously apply soap and shampoo to his oblivious body.
Washing a toddler is, basically, like washing rice – you want to keep doing it until the water sluicing down the plughole runs clear, and not the odd, yellowy-orangey cordial of dirt, muck and food that scientists (me) call Toddler Juice. This done, I cede control once more, and he spends the last few minutes washing not me, but his tiny nuclear family of Ceratopsidae, who have thus far watched all this unfold in silence.
He sprays their tiny plastic forms, until they squeak. ‘It’ll just be a minute, pet,’ he coos gently, blasting each with the love of a doting, desperate dad.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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