Quinn receives Father of the Year award

Just kidding.

A few things never fail: it rains (or snows) after I wash my car, my toast lands on the floor peanut-butter side down, and if Lauralee leaves me home with Emma for the evening: it's bath night.

Bathing is a chore that is not to be enjoyed, but to be finished as quickly as possible. The same goes for bathing Emma.

The other night Lauralee left for a Relief Society function. Our ward Relief Society is officially in spring fever mode. It's like it kills them to go all winter without an activity, so when the nicer weather rolls around, they have to make up for lost time. Book reviews, recipe exchanges, gardening tips, cooking classes -- all jammed into one month. Oh, and we can't forget the Relief Society birthday social. Happy 168th birthday, Relief Society! What do you get for the Society that has everything?

Anywho, when bathtime came around I took Emma upstairs and started running the bathwater. I stashed Emma in her room, but she eventually wandered into the bathroom with a stuffed animal. Awww...how cute. And then: Splash! She slam dunked that teddy bear into the bathtub full of water. I really just didn't see that coming. Emma has 108 stuffed animals, but of course the one that she decided to "baptize" was a wind-up teddy bear with a music box inside. You know, one that could actually be permanently damaged by water.

Emma's slam dunk form was actually quite good. It was a two-handed power dunk, along the lines of a 76ers-era Charles Barkley (see figure 1). It lacked the showmanship of a Karl Malone dunk (see figure 2), and certainly did not have the high knee elevation of an in-shape Shaquille O'Neal (see figure 3) or the power of a Darryl Dawkins (figure 4). All in all, though, it was pretty good for a 16-month old.

Funny how the first thing I thought of when the bear hit the water was "Laura's going to laugh her head off that I can't handle a simple task like bathing our daughter without some kind of problem."

I rescued the bear, secretly grateful that Laura had rented The Guardian several years ago. Even though I didn't watch the whole movie (Laura kept blocking the screen, a glint in her eyes and a small amount of drool trailing from the corner -- sometimes corners -- of her mouth) everything I learned about water rescue I owe to Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Costner.

How do you dry a stuffed animal -- in this case stuffed not only with stuffing but with moving parts -- without creating a festering sog-ball of mold? I've never seen a Haley's Hints about that. Since Emma had fled the scene of her dunk -- beating her chest and hot-dogging it back down the court to her room -- I turned around to the bedroom to try to find a suitable place to hang this bear for drying. And that's when I heard another splash. Emma had enjoyed her first dunking experience so much that she had gone back to her room to get some more stuff.

Emma has 763 books of various shapes and sizes. Many of them belonged to her mother, and the book that was arguably Laura's favorite was Love You Forever. It's a heartwarming story about love, loss, life, death, and clingy moms. Lauralee likes this book so much that she actually went to the trouble of buying two copies of the book -- one paperback and one hardback -- in case one of the copies got ruined. To my horror and embarrassment, Emma had picked up only two books and threw them in the bath -- and it was both copies of this book. I've since tried to calculate what were exactly the odds of this occurring, but my poor Casio couldn't even handle the numbers.

Emma skeedaddled out of the bathroom again and I grabbed the books from the water. I knew I needed to separate all the pages so that they wouldn't dry and get stuck together. I started to individually separate each page of each book when I realized that the water was still running in the bathtub. I stopped it before it began to overflow. It was certainly the most water that Emma had ever bathed in. I got her a bendy straw to breathe through. It was all good.

The bath was uneventful, and I put Emma down to sleep as quickly as possible, then spent the evening sitting in the rocking chair downstairs, painstakingly drying each page of each book with a hairdryer, and watching my stories on the television.

Both books are still readable, but many of the pages have a Declaration of Independence-like texture to them.

I'm not sure where this ranks on the list of poor parenting incidents committed by Quinn. I'm thinking it's somewhere between letting Emma eat a leaf and sending Emma out to scare off the raccoons in the backyard.

--Quinn