The Joy of Peeing on Your Dad

One of the things I’ve learnt is not to massage your baby with lotion before dressing him. He looked pretty quiet and happy after a warm bath, and there i was working the lotion into him, and I wondered why he was suddenly smiling and twisting. Then, I noticed this stream going all over my shirt, pants, the table and the towel. No wonder the nurses have warned us that we should always dress a baby boy quickly.

But babies like to be touched, we have been told. When I was caressing him, he lay back, arms out wide with a smile on his face. Yesterday, after the bath, he actually looked a little contrite at having a wee at me. When I rubbed his head, he suddenly broke into a laugh and smile, almost as if he was glad I wasn’t pissed. I’m imagining all of this, I reckon. We’ve noticed that his smiles are now lasting longer than the split second last week. He’s just into week three now.

We had taken him for a walk yesterday morning for some late breakfast (with he-who-peed-on-daddy, there’s only early early morning, or late morning. 8-9 a.m. doesn’t exist anymore.) We ran into the typical Melbourne wind, except this one was hot and dusty. Which is probably typical in summer too. It blew a whole lot of dust, sand, and soot all over us and stopped us in the tracks.

Checking on him, he had covered his face and turned sideways to avoid the hot dusty wind - all this while asleep. Babies have wonderful instincts, we’re finding out. That apparently extends to bad singing. We were watching an old Eddie Murphy movie, Coming to America, where Edddie had broken out into a wondefully off-tune song. Siyuan covered his ears.