There's something different about your flat/house, isn't there? You've changed the curtains? New carpet? Different furniture? No, I know what it is. You've got all the same stuff as before, but now it's covered with sick.
Six months can be a lifetime for soft furnishings. Items that might have lasted decades if they only came into contact with adults, will be rubble after sustained abuse by babies. And this is before the baby can crawl and walk and knock things over, as it will in the months to come. People who are houseproud suffer the greatest agonies, as you would expect.
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| Effective Parenting Techniques |
You can keep Junior in nappies 23 hours and 56 minutes a day, and yet it will be in the other four minutes, when you have been momentarily distracted by a ringing phone, that your firstborn will squirt out a bowelful of steaming diarrhoea all over everything. And if you have a vomiter, there are no effective precautions you can take; you just have to hope. Carpets suffer the worst. Sofas are next in line. Curtains will be untouched if they are old and need replacing. New curtains will be spattered so artistically you may find yourself pretending it's part of the pattern.
Amazingly, as with everything else, you seem to get used to it. When our son was just walking, he liked to get out of his nappy at every possible opportunity. Within a minute there would be a small puddle of urine somewhere. At first you mop it up with 53 sheets of kitchen, roll and pour on a bucketful of antiseptic. But there will come a time when you won't bother to it up at all. You can't be fucked. It's only a carpet. It'll survive. (Urine, you will argue, is sterile. What harm can it do? You and your partner will then try to remember which batty 1960s actress used to drink her own pee, by which time it will have soaked in anyway. Soon you may even argue that it strengthens the carpet weave.)
It won't just be you who descends so willingly into squalor. The mother of your child will accompany you all the way. She may even sprint on ahead. The more time you spend with your baby, the quicker your standards will fall. If your flat is as tiny as mine they don't so much fall as plummet. People with large houses and pots of money can try to localize the squalor, but most of us succumb in the end. Soon it's as much as we can do to take the mysterious pubic hairs out of our recently delivered pizza. Parenthood sets free the Wayne and Waynetta Slob within us all.
WASHING MACHINE
This is your main weapon against squalor. You would never have guessed this, in the ease and luxury of your previous existence. The washing machine sat in a corner, occasionally washing things, as its warranty promised. Mine had lasted well over ten years, had never needed repairing, was only really used twice a week, in traditional bachelor fashion. One wash for whites, one wash for coloureds. Then a few years later, one wash for whites, one wash for coloureds, one wash for whites you'd mistakenly put in with the coloureds. Even when my girlfriend moved in, and the number of whites mistakenly put in with coloureds doubled, the machine kept going. And then the baby came along.
Call me oddball, but I believe washing machines make a different noise after a baby comes along. During their many wash, rinse and spin cycles they sound in pain, as though remembering the ease and luxury of their previous existence. Many pack up almost immediately: I don't think 'suicide' is too strong a word for this. Ours showed a self-destructive streak but could not bring itself to end it all. First the dial fell off, so you could only guess which program you were switching on. When we had sorted this out with Blu-tack, the machine sprang a leak.
Apparently one of the pipes had spontaneously tied a knot in itself. A few weeks later the door fell off, but we stuck it back on and somehow (mainly involving a lot of string) managed to keep the damn thing going for another year or so. Then the second baby came along.
Now we have a new washing machine. It has digital displays and flashing red lights. It takes three loads a day without whining. You can even time it to switch on early in the morning, when you are standing right next to it, pouring the tea, with coated tongue and sulphurous breath after an evening out and four hours of interrupted sleep. It knows, I tell you. It knows. To find out more, you can check out Effective Parenting Techniques.