Beans, beans, the musical fruit….

…The more you eat, the more you toot.

I still remember this song years after I stopped watching cartoons on Nickelodeon with my brother and sisters.

Yes, we’ve been eating a lot of beans lately.

It’s primarily what I use my slow cooker for. Now, when I say my slow cooker, it actually belongs to my sister and I – erm – “borrowed” it four years ago because she didn’t use it and said I could try it before I went off buying myself yet another kitchen gadget that I was never going to use.

I use it mostly to cook, and lots of it. And Roz find it really easy to eat, especially with nshima. As we say in Zambia, it really goes down.

So with the slow cooker, I tend to cook a whole batch of it at the weekend, put it into some tupper ware  and freeze it. Krys then has the option of heating it up with rice, pasta, potatoes etc during the day for Roz’s lunch, or I cook nshima and my lovely veggies in the evening for us to eat.

Last weekend, I made a particularly lovely batch but forgot my one crucial ingredient – a bit of sugar to neutralise the erm…farting effect.

So yesterday I came home and no matter where I sat, Roz was just plain old smelly…and farting. A lot.

I mean seriously, how can such an adorably cute child produce so much loud and smelly gas?

And every time she farted she would giggle and say

“I farted!”
By bed time, I was convinced her, me and the fart would not fit in the bedroom together.
 I opened all the windows in the house for ten minutes then went to have my shower and got ready for bed.

Entered the room after my shower and there was Roz sitting on the bed grinning and she said,

“Mummy, you know what?”

“What?”

“When you were in the bathroom I did one, two , three, four, five farts! I did one in the corridor, and one in the sitting room and more in the bed and one biiiiggg one right now.”

“Lovely honey.”

Now I’m all for all children being treated equally regardless of gender, so there’s no tellings off in this house over farts. I accept it’s a normal and necessary bodily function of which social niceties can be gently introduced e.g. silent but deadly, blame it on the dog, blame it on the baby, pretend you don’t even smell anything at all…. and failing all this, perhaps we’ll actually succeed in getting to the bathroom before she lets one loose. Seriously, the kid still picks her boogers and eats them, farting is the last of her worries.

Shudder!

So I said,

“That’s lovely babe.”

And held my breath and much as possible.

“Do you mind if I open  the window? It’s too smelly in here again.

“No. and I love farting mummy. It’s fun”.

photo credit: liquidnight via photopin cc