Big Friendly Vegan

It must be common behaviour, a genetic predisposition or possibly evidence of genius; my kids love covering themselves in their own shit.

I have three lovely, beautiful little daughters. Precious angels. All three of them are shit artists. By this, I don't mean they are liars (although the oldest two are learning quickly), rather I mean that they have all decided to paint themselves and their immediate surroundings with their own feces.

I will admit that it was during their very young days. My eldest daughter would delight at putting her hands into her freshly filled nappy, pulling out the contents and spreading it all over her cot, wall and self. The first time it happened was a revelation. You could smell it before you entered the room. That's how you knew something was wrong. That, and the silence. The silence was first. You would hear the gooing and cooing of a child falling off to sleep. Then there would be nothing. It was not the silence of sleep, it was the silence of "something wrong". Parents know the difference. You rise to check out the source of the silence, and then the smell hits you. I have smelt it so often now that I can recognise the sub-sensory tingling of such odours. It is like the hairs on the back of your neck standing up.

The sight of a child covered in their own excrement is actually something that can be easily described. The scene is one of a kid covered in chocolate. You wonder, for a good amount of time given the strong olfactory evidence to the contrary, how your little one got hold of so much chocolate in their cot. Reality quickly catches up with fantasy, tackles it, grabs it by the hair and forces its face in the ground.

The only thing you can do is grab the demon spawn and put them, at arms length, into the shower. It is times like this that you are glad every shower product is pleasantly scented and every cleaning product smells of pine. What can you do but clean it all? It amazes me where you find it, although it probably shouldn't. When I was younger I was friends with a competitive body builder. One night his girlfriend, myself and a few other guys painted said bodybuilder with several coats of fake tan in preparation for a competition. That night, still wet, he slept on top of a canvas drop sheet on top of his bed. In the night he sleep walked and spread the fake tan in the most bizarre locations; how the hell a fake tan hand print got on the roof I will never know. How a baby, that can barely stand let alone walk, can get shit five feet up a wall will remain equally mysterious.

This happened so often that we began calling the situation a "Code Brown". When those words were uttered we would fall into an efficient and well practiced routine: get the baby, clean the baby, pull all sheets off, get wipes and disinfectant, wipe everywhere (even if you can't see anything there - trust me, it probably is), reassemble bed, reassemble child, go back to normal life (What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas). She eventually grew out of the behaviour, but it was taken up by our second daughter when she was about the same age. Now our third one is coding with proficiency.

Maybe all babies do this. If so I wish they would put a chapter on it in the baby books. If this is what we were meant to expect while we were expecting...well, it wouldn't have made a difference, but would have been nice to know. If it isn't common, maybe it just runs in our family. In which case, I really hope it doesn't skip a generation. Maybe, just maybe, the girls have worked out a way of communicating this type of behaviour to each other. Maybe the cot, used by all three girls, has some hidden messages scribed in some sort of baby language, each user adding to the sum of emergent knowledge. If so, then my daughters are geniuses, and the future recipients of an antique cot.