he's now ten pounds lighter

Now that Daniel is enjoying the high life that is solids, woo, there's been a change in the texture of his, uh, 'creative expressions'. Where once we mopped up the fruits of his digestive tract, now the tendency is more toward something that needs to be scraped off with a spatula.

Which isn't always a bad thing.

Case in point.

After his bath last night, I plonked the deebster, wearing little more than a towel, onto the playmat for his regular airing of thenether regions. The boy, of course, took off across the room like a bat out of hell, taking Miss Kitty and his towel along for the ride.

Poor Miss Kitty. She'd only just been washed since her last trip across the room with Daniel. Dude had learned all about finger painting last week in daycare - and you know how they say that yarpy babies yarp less once they begin solids? Well it's horseshit. It's right up there with that crap about breastfeeding making you lose the baby weight. Daniel pukes just as much as he ever did, if not more so, except now it has a vague orange hue (and I'm just as porky as I was when he was born, if not fucking more so. Geez). Combining those mad finger painting skilz with my son, aka The Chunder From Down Under, using Miss Kitty as his paint bomb and the floor as his canvas, meant a really bad day for the cat and an end product on the floor that was not unlike something one would expect from the late Pro Hart.

Last night though, with a freshly washed Kitty as his sidekick, Daniel was rolling around on the floor and I was standing by. I was distracted by something shiny and the next time I looked, he was merrily dragging Miss Kitty's head through a vaguely tinted, tangerine puddle with his left hand and splashing into it with his right, completely oblivious to the rapidly expanding puddle he was lying in, and to the Mr.Whippy action going on out back.

I squawked and lept into action, and Daniel responded to my squawk with a smile and a whole body jam. I kind of stalled then because the smile/jam combo is usually achingly adorable, but with the inclusion of an assortment of biological matter, no, not so much so. What it was was...mooshy. But! While it was disgusting and an experience I have no wish to repeat again, ever, it wasn't the uber-disgusting puddle of liquid gold it has been before and that I prayed it never would be again. It was a modest pile. Pick uppable too, yannow? With a rubber glove and a forest's worth of paper towels, but put it this way, I didn't need to don a rubber suit to survive a dip in the bubbling cauldron of ick.

So there's yer silver lining. Enjoy.

Wrapping up this riveting tale, fortunately I hadn't yet let the bathwater out because apparently I'm psychic. It was tepid and for the record, had fallen victim to The Yarp earlier in the evening, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and Daniel was unceremoniously dunked right back into it, disinfected, rinsed off, dried, duct taped into a bin liner and put to bed.

Miss Kitty was soaked in bleach, and I'm seriously reconsidering the ludicrous concept of combining fresh air and babies' bottoms.