so, you can be having your baby, and living with her and taking care of her and feeding her and everything, but there are such things as the 'defining moment,' when it becomes all too clear just what you have gotten yourself into. like, say, just after you have sold your soul to satan, and you have just found out that you have been totally swindled and you hear his maniacal laughter ringing in your ears and before your eyes is a swirling vision of the hell which will shortly be yours evermore.

such a moment for parents, then, is the projectile poo. i was changing my dear little peanut's diaper, and had gotten her all clean. i was just going in with a finger full of a&d ointment, when the was a bubble of poo where there hadn't been one before.

no problem, i thought, i'll just wipe this up. i get a wipe with one hand and lift her legs with the other, and then it happened. peanut makes an angry red face, and a steaming brown arc jets across my field of vision. dropping the legs, i jump back out of the way, but she nails my arm anyway. it could have been much worse. ephelba is no help, as she is lying on the bed, trying to get in yet another nap and is now helpless with laughter and gasping that she might pee.

in retrospect, lifting the legs was a bad idea, since that only added to the trajectory peanut was able to achieve. ephelba, who finds something amusing whenever i change the peanut, was really starting to wear out her welcome. little peanut had shot poo over a distance of four and a half feet, leaving her mark on a borrowed magazine, a phone book, a fresh diaper cover only just laid out, and, of course, my arm. luckily, no carpet was involved in the incident.