So I went through a lot of different ideas for a name for this post and for some reason the Will Smith song ‘Men In Black’ popped in my head and it just stuck. Go back and read the title like you were singing that song, go ahead I’ll wait. Now you are going to have that song stuck in your head the rest of the day, you’re welcome. So what is the IPP? Well much like the Men In Black, the IPP is an organization whose primary objective is to monitor, license, regulate, and police bath time on planet earth. Most people speculate about their presence but the majority of the public do not know of their existence. They are the IPP or also known as the Invisible Peeper Police. Now I am sure you are asking ‘who the hell is that?’ but just walk with me a little bit and you might be able to relate.
It’s funny how we always think that we are the only ones to ever go through certain situations in our life and the minute we find out that someone else has shared the same experience as us… #mindblown. A few weeks back we were having dinner with some good friends of ours, we’ll refer to them as ‘The Rogan’s’ (one child with one on the way), and we somehow found ourselves talking about bath time with our little ones. Now this is no exclusive topic since everyone gives their kids a bath but then we started discussing how we act when giving said bath. As we continued our discussion, Mrs. Rogan made me have one of those ‘oh shit’ moments as she talked about how when her son was younger, she felt the need to announce to the world when she was cleaning his ‘little buddy’. We laughed and carried on but have no doubt ladies and gentlemen that at that moment my mind was blown. Instantly the imagination node in the frontal lobe envisioned my friend talking aloud announcing her intentions to clean her son as if she was being watched, and by voicing her intention she would not be subject to prosecution by the IPP. Good times, good times. It was more so amusing to me because I honestly thought that I was the only weirdo out there in the world that felt the need to make announcements when cleaning ‘Mr. Peepers’.
I remember it all started with my first born, my son. When he was a baby it was no big deal, a bath was a bath. It was really only after my son started to get older, walking, talking and forming his own opinions that things seemed to change for me. Me being a man, I know what I carry in my tackle box and I would prefer that only a few select people handle what’s inside (basically me, my wife, Scarlet Johansson (shhh don’t tell my wife)) but now there were two tackle boxes in the house. I remember the first few times trying to hand my son the loofah and give him some general guidance on what I needed him to do, you know real manly stuff. “Hey boy, clean Mr. Peepers.” Which would turn into him putting a soapy loofah in his mouth or eye or somewhere other than the directed area, and for a while I just let it slide hahaha. I mean getting soap in your mouth or eyes will toughen you up, right? I eventually said that I was not doing my boy any justice so I took control of the situation and that is when it happened… I for some reason felt the need to announce when I was cleaning the twig, berries, and gooch aka grundle aka the landing pad between the hang downs and the brown town. Yes I said gooch, we all know what the gooch is correct? If you don’t know then google it. So there I was trying to keep a calm atmosphere while trying to remain tough. “Hey bud, daddy just needs to clean up Mr. Peepers.” In my head I’m like ‘don’t make eye contact.’ “Ok, we’re done.” all within 2.5 seconds. Then thinking “Whew, I got through that OK.” Now these announcements only lasted a short while because as I started to think about it, I quickly realized that this was the dumbest shit ever. I’m his father, I don’t have to feel uncomfortable washing my own kids or make announcements. You know some of the reason I would say we as parents feel uncomfortable is because we put ourselves in that situation, and we think how weird it would be for someone to wash our under carriage. I will also put a little blame on the society we live in. Now I’m not going to go down that road but we can all agree that we live in a bat shit crazy world, that at times, makes us parents second guess the simplest/normalest/dumbest things. Now even though I had come to this simple realization about my son, I still had so much worse of a time with my daughter (If you recall the trouble that I had just cleaning her after changing a diaper). Again, no reason why it was so weird but I guess it all falls back to me not knowing the proper way to clean a cuuca buuca. I mean I have showered with my wife and seen the level 3 scrub down and wondered “WTF was going on” haha. We know for guys that if soap comes anywhere near our region then we can consider ourselves clean. So once again I had to refer to the professional, my wife, and had her watch me like a foreman on a job site for a project that was past schedule. “Hey babe, am I doing this right? How do you get the soap out? You mean like this? What about… ah fuck it, you just give her a bath.” And that is basically how it all went down for bath time for my baby girl. One day I just gave up, threw in the towel, and passed my daughter off to my wife for bath time. Executive decision style, and I said I would just deal with the boy. Now don’t get me wrong, I have no problems taking care of both the kids, when needed, but I think taking the easy way out was the smart move. Kind of like when Michael Jordan tried to play baseball but realized it was not his thing so he went back to dominate what he was good at. #dadwin
As crazy as it sounds, I just didn’t realize that the ‘uncomfortable’ feeling was a ‘thing’. I reached out to a few other friends and it was interesting to hear them share the same or similar feelings. They had one version or another about getting their kids clean, be it diaper changing or giving them a bath, and doing some kind of weird announcement to the child to avoid an issue with the IPP. So if you fall into this weird group, please find some comfort that you are not as weird as you think you are. But never forget, the IPP is watching… always watching.
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