Stay the course with this one, dear reader, I promise the payoff is worth it. Okay, maybe not "worth it", but, well...just wait.
So.
I admit this with some pain, since in the town where I live it feels akin to admitting you really enjoy infecting puppies with the ebola virus, but here it is: I really like Target. There's a lot that I don't like about it, but as one of the teenagers in youth group said, "It's a lot more fun than the mall". Which is true. I get the downsides, so don't flip out...almost everything I buy is secondhand and only a very few purchases come from places like Target, even though my secret dream is to spend an hour wandering around in one with Tina Fey.
Among the things I really like about Target (I pronounce it "Tar-zhay" pretty frequently, which is the sort of thing that my mother does that sometimes irritates me and will surely irritate the hell out of my kids in a few years...I should really stop that) are their collaborations* with great designers like Orla Kiely, Dwell Studio, and Thomas O'Brien. For low income people like me who harbor aspirations towards the kinds of stylish spaces that show up over at Bloesem (my poor husband is well over hearing about my plans to get a credenza like this), it's tough to cross Target off the list when you can sometimes get pretty incredible design without hurting yourself and those you love financially. I have a Thomas O'Brien coverlet for our bed that is way, way up there on my list of most favored household objects. No one can take that from me!
Anyway, I was at Target today and spotted this:
It's a toddler swimsuit which is part of the Liberty of London for Target line that is, well, not out yet. I'm wondering if this was a bit of a snafu, like that time that I was working in a record store and accidentally put out a copy of Land Before Time XXXII: Dinosaur Apocalypse before its Tuesday release date and then some kid bought it and I got an Extremely Serious and Oddly Personally Invested Phone Call from the other record store in the mall accusing me of high crimes and misdemeanors and threatening me with federal law. If it was, well bully to me, because this suit is freaking adorable and there was only one of them. The big kid wanted it sooo badly but I wouldn't buy her the only other suit there that would have fit her, which was a two piece, not because I'm worried about her showing too much skin but because the idea of a four year-old having to worry about keeping her top down and her bottoms up hurt my head.
Further digression: she was extraordinarily tired when this event of me buying the baby a swimsuit went down, and had a tantrum, which began as a direct complaint to me about fairness and deprivation, but when I reminded her that the store simply did not have her size and it had nothing to do with me she ended our trek back to the car by wailing "Target won't liiiiiisten to meeeeee! Target just wooooon't liiiiiiisten! Target DOES NOT CAAAARE!"
Did I mention that I love this suit?
I've never seen anything quite like it for a baby. It's actually kind of sophisticated.
I tried it on her when we got home, curious to see whether it would fit this summer, which it will. The baby looked cute but incredibly ridiculous, which is pretty much just how she looks. Clad in nothing but a diaper and a swimsuit she booked it towards the bathroom where her sister was having her evening ablutions, and climbed in.
This is the good part.
Baby isn't allowed into the bathtub because every time she gets in there, she poops. Every. Single. Time. I would elaborate on how many times this has happened, but then you, like my husband, would throw your hands up in the air and exclaim "You caaaaan't put her in the baaaath!", and then you would have to imagine how many times my husband has had to help with immediate child evacuation,hosing of poop down the tub drain and applying bleach with wanton liberality, and you would pity him. But this time, Baby was in a swimsuit! With a diaper on! Poop away, freebird!
All was going well and big sister had requested her own swimsuit be brought out when things started to go bad. Soap got involved. Bar soap.
Mama was busy taking pictures when Baby quicky, decisively, with the kind of kamikaze assuredness that only toddlers and the criminally insane can summon, took a large bite out of the soap.
Which she promptly gagged on.
Which caused her to vomit in the tub.
On the bright side, her diaper was waterlogged, but clean.
*A number of years back I bought a weird piece of candy from a Japanese market that showed a picture of some kind of nut dressed as a vaudeville performer holding hands with what was possibly an anthropomorphic pretzel jumping into a pool of chocolate, with the words "Collaboration in the chocolate!" right above them, and now every time I see the word "collaboration", that is the image I get in my head.