Does the baby wear clothes?

I prise apart the minutes between packing everyone’s lunches and putting on everyone’s shoes to take an overdue shit.

Pre-empting one hundred small disasters, surviving one hundred more, means my sphincter is always pretty tense. I need at least two minutes of quiet before I can convince my body it is safe to poop.

My husband’s head pops round the bathroom door, followed by a dangling baby.

“Does the baby wear clothes?” He asks.

I scream. My husband quickly retreats.

I continue to sit on the toilet.

Does the baby wear clothes.

Does the baby? Wear clothes?

I cannot fathom what this means.

The baby. Our baby. Our second baby.

Who has been alive for 6 months. Who he has seen. Many times. Wearing clothes.

Does the baby wear clothes? I turn the words around and around as if the question were a Rubix cube.

My toddler yells something about porridge on the fish tank. I abandon the toilet, flushing away nothing but my frustration. Washing my hands only to cleanse myself of the murder I’m mentally committing.

Does the baby wear clothes?

I could stuff a onesie down his throat and then choke him out with the baby’s tights. The embroidered ones that my sister got from John Lewis. They’re really good quality. Strong enough for a throttling. I could muffle his screams with a pram suit.

I turn off the tap and exit the bathroom. My husband stands in the corridor looking sheepish, holding the baby between us like a human shield.

He has changed her out of her pyjamas. Ding-a-fucking-ling. But he has redressed her in another set of pyjamas that is neither appropriate for the weather, nor the time of day. I accept the baby. She is not naked. I’ll take what I can get.

I move towards my toddler, who is covered in porridge, and wet – wetter than I would expect. Really wet, suspiciously wet, and – oh god, holding something, gingerly, proudly, something small and oh no – oh, it’s a guppy. It was a guppy. Well, at least something is getting flushed this morning.