The latest installment of the Shrek movies is predictably number one at the box office for the past coupla weeks but I have no inkling to go see it, even though i have enjoyed the previous Shreks. I’ve got my own little ogre at home right now. She turned 6 weeks today and boy, can I tell you, I had forgotten how gross little babies can be!
I don’t know who came up with this image of a sweet, angelic little baby. Expressions like “sleeping like a baby” and “skin as soft as baby” and “sweet baby smell” have got to go away. They are as accurate as Orwellian Party slogans. Sleeping like a baby? Oh, you mean, being woken up every 3 hours by piercing shrieks that demand prompt poopy diaper changes followed by a greedy clasp on your nipple, still sore from the last feeding? This is usually followed by a burping session that ends up in a spitting up session, where your little wonder throws up the milk she has ingested all over your neck, chest and dripping down between your breasts onto your tummy except now it has morphed from milk into some sort of mutant cottage cheese like element.
Skin as soft as a baby, yeah right! Babies have the worst skin!!! Their faces are usually covered in what is kindly termed baby acne, which they make worse by scratching their cheeks and eyes bloody with the razor blades known as little newborn fingernails. Their scalp is often covered in crusty yellow scales called cradle cap, which you may treat with olive oil, to give it that nice, yellow, crusty, and now oily texture. As for their bottoms, those red bumpy spots are the dreaded diaper rash. Sweet baby smell, don’t make me laugh! Between the burps, farts, diarrhea shooting out of the A-Hole like mustard on a hot dog mixed in with the lovely ammonia smell of pee, I am going to need a gas mask to make it through the rest of the year!
No siree bob, if I need to be entertained for 2 hours by a stinky, grumpy ogre with a big fat tummy and all sorts of liquid and gas emissions oozing and squirting out of every hole imaginable in the anatomy, I don’t need to sit through Mike Myers’ terrible Scottish accent, I can get it right at home. All I can say is thank goodness nature has blinded us parents with unconditional, gushing amounts of love akin to the most passionate Tolstoi novels in order to withstand what is, through any objective third party’s eyes, a veritable Dantean journey into the seven circles of hell 🙂