my private ramblings

So my brother had his first child this past January. It’s been kind of an interesting experience for him. For the longest time, he thought he had the world’s sweetest smelling baby until he discovered that his girlfriend had been squirting rosewater on the baby’s head. That revelation was a little bit disappointing for him.

Recently, he tackled bathing the baby. A quick google search reveals that this is generally a 29 step process, akin to fusing atoms or decoding the human genome. One popular approach seems to be just taking the baby into the bathtub with you, thus reducing the likelihood that the slippery little sucker will launch out of your hands. My brother’s girlfriend is a bit of a baby guru, and so my brother decided that he would impress her by washing the baby all by himself while she went out to dinner. So after she leaves, my brother gets into the tub with the baby and starts washing him. Well, half way through, little Freddy decides to poop. So the newly minted father has a solid minute when he’s sitting there, with the poop floating around the tub, debating what to do. Eventually deciding that it would probably be kind of gross to just continue bathing Freddy in his own “private creation”, my brother opts to get up, dump out the water, and just start over. Well, he’s gotten out of the tub, emptied the water, and is standing there, the two of them stark naked when his girlfriend walks in. I imagine it must have taken her a minute or two to completely comprehend the situation– that both father and child were covered in excrement– before she really started to reevaluate her life choices…

Last time, I went to visit the little family, I may have made a supreme blunder. I casually mentioned to my brother a recent news event here in New York about a father dropping off his baby in a taxicab. I thought it was somewhat moronic because he could have just dropped her off at a safe harbor. My brother proceeded to interrupt me, mid-story, and make me explain the concept of a safe harbor two or three times and each time, he got more and more excited: “Wait. You can just drop the baby off? No consequences?” He looked down at little Freddy, clad in his new bear suit, and no doubt contemplated a life without floating freebies in his bathtub. Fortunately, at that point, Freddy’s mother instinctively sensing danger, whisked her child away.