Tigy’s Blog

What does it take to get a 4 year old to stress out and loose it? One baby alive and 4 AA batteries.

Our little angel has earned herself a huge prize, something that turned out to be $100 worth of pure stress. We agreed on the prize early on and I tried to talk her out of it when I found out the actual cost, but gosh darn it, she was focussed on getting this damn doll.

What did she do? Without giving away all the gory details she finally started going wees on the toilet, something we have been working on for 2 years now, yes thats right 2 very long years…

In our excitement we promised her a baby alive, something she had been asking for, if she filled a "star chart" with 1 star being awarded for each tinkle. Lesson here is always check the price of something before you agree to it, never assume you know what it costs.

Well our little miss stubborn, who wouldn’t even enter the room containing the toilet a mere week before hand was up there peeing up to 6 times a day or more. When she got upset nothing would come out we told her she had to drink something first, so she would grab a glass, knock it back and run to the toilet and wait for something to happen. Explaining it too time for the body to process the drink meant she would sometimes go away only to check back on the toilet every 5 minutes to see if it was ready… God bless her she tried so hard.

So after 22 confirmed tinkles and one final attempt to talk her into something ‘better’ (i.e. cheaper) we bought her the baby alive.

What is it I hear you ask? Have you seen the Stephen King movie Carrie, and perhaps are also familiar with Chuckie? We’ll if you answered yes to both of those you have a vague idea. This thing is a little girl stress machine.

As I speak Beth is fast asleep, absolutely exhausted from the few hours of work of looking after the worlds most demanding baby!

Beth was so excited to get her baby alive, I doubt I’ve ever seen a more excited person when she came running into the house holding the box.

After showing me all the bits through the clear cellophane we began unwrapping, we got baby alive out first, baby immediately said she was hungry and daddy (me) hadn’t managed to untie the feeding spoon or bowl yet. This was not mummy or daddy’s baby, but Beth’s baby and she was very determined to do a good job of looking after her and making her happy. Daddy wasn’t getting the food out of the super twist tied in box and baby was hungry, this was a problem, a big angry you better hurry up or I will hurt you problem.

Anyways crisis adverted as I rip the feeding utensils from their package with bits of wire, cardboard and fragments of my skin flying everywhere.

Baby by now has moved past hunger and is now thirsty, but it’s OK as I have an unwrapping strategy, brute strength and knowledge that doctors can probably reattach just about any extremities which may be severed in the operation. But before I can get the bottle free baby isn’t thirsty anymore, she wants to play… ahh… the first couple of bars of twinkle twinkle little sta… oh oh that stops and she tells us she’s done a stinky, we have to change her nappy.

Now the cycle begins, feed me, I’m thirsty, lets play, I just shat my nappy, change me, feed me, Im thirsty… cycling through them at about  1 a minute, you get the picture of what it is like.

Apparently she also gets tired and goes to sleep, for about 1 minute!

Anyway we are coping with this, Fiona leaves the house, William goes to bed, Beth is trying to satisfy the eating, drinking machine and I go outside to resume my work on repairing our trailer.

About 5 minutes later I hear Beth talking loudly, then it sounds quite stroppy and demanding. She’s inside so I can’t hear the words but I assume she is just playing some game with baby.

Then she starts screaming, a real angry scream, not scared, but really, really, really angry.

I run to see what the problem is thinking William must have climbed out of his cot, managed to open the door, come into the lounge and pulled baby alive’s head off.

Beth meets me at the door holding baby and with a look in her eyes that would have sent Joseph Stalin running to find his mummy. "Daddy I was calling you, where were you!" she half spits, half shouts at me. Her eyes are afire with a passion that shouldn’t exist in someone that’s only existed for a few years.

"Baby needs her nappy changed, she told me, I am trying to change it and I cant, you need to help me" she spits at me again. "You need to help me, she needs her nappy changed NOW!"

I can see her slowly go from pure rage and anger to emotional overload and baby advises us that "oh, oh I did a stinky ".

That’s it for Beth, she so wants to do it right, to be the perfect mommy for her baby, she tried so hard to change the nappy but couldn’t. "You have to help me, I tried, I couldn’t find you, baby needs you."

Now the tears are rolling down her cheeks, her face is redder than a beetroot soaked in red die. I’m watching a complete mini melt down, she’s still full of rage, but that’s boiled over and now she’s snapped. She feels she’s failing her baby and she’s tried so hard, so, so hard and she can’t cope.

Baby alive thinks this is a good time to tell us we still haven’t changed her nappy "Change me" she says.

We’ve now completely lost it, tears running everywhere. She manages to get out between sobs, "I tried and I couldn’t, I called you and you didn’t come, you didn’t come, I needed you daddy, baby needed you."

Baby alive has driven her to a nervous breakdown in less than 15 minutes…

So we got it all under control, changed the nappy, told daddy off a few more times for not staying in touch and continued to change the nappy every 5 minutes for the next hour. My little girl wasn’t going to let that damn baby go for less than 1 second with a dirty nappy.

Yes I did turn it off, more than once, but Beth would keep checking on it, worrying why it wouldn’t wake up from its little "nap", so eventually I would have to turn it on. I tried to tell her we should ‘turn it off’ but in her mind that was akin to me telling a new mother we should just drown her baby… with a similar reaction…

We got baby alive down for the night, and Beth very soon afterwards, too tired to put up a fight, too tired for a story book, just wanted to go to sleep. Her only concern about going to bed was she was worried baby alive would wake up during the night and need feeding, and she was so tired she didn’t want to be woken up. "But I will daddy, I’ll get up and feed her if she cries cause she’s my baby", she told me. "I will, but I don’t want her to", she said.

Things may be better tomorrow, after the novelty wears off but Fiona and I are resigned to another week of today’s trauma, and also resigned that after a week of this we have about zero chance of now having any grandchildren…