The Caterpillar has had a little bout of diaper rash -- the first in her young life. I totally attribute the fact that we haven't had to fight the diaper rash battle so far to two things: 1) not slathering on a bunch of goop, salves, powder and other crap on her porcelain bottom skin and 2) I generally only use wipes when she's dirty. When she's simply wet, I just let her little butt dry off a bit before sticking on the next diaper. Someone gave me this advice a few years ago and for this kid at least, it's totally worked.

Plus, while it's no sphagnum moss solution, but it is a little more ecologically friendly and a little less wasteful then using a wipe each and every time I change her diaper. As a result, I've still got the original tube of diaper rash cream and bottle of talcum powder that I had when she was born.

This recent foray into eating anything and everything she can find, however, has contributed to a shiny red bottom of stop light proportions (The child eats pinto beans... straight from the can. *shudder*) and I've had to break into the stash of zinc oxide. The problem is, The Caterpillar's other main interest involves picking up two completely random items and walking around the house with one in each hand, guarding them viciously and taking them everywhere she goes for the entire day. Yesterday, it was a pair of The Dormouse's underwear and the lone tube of diaper rash cream from the changing table.

Anyway, in the course of carrying around these two oh-so-important items yesterday, the tube of diaper rash got lost somewhere in the house. So when The KingofHearts got home and decided to change her diaper at one point, he couldn't find the diaper rash cream and instead decided to use talcum powder instead. But any of you who knows The KoH personally knows this about him: he is patently incapable of underdoing anything.

I have a musician friend who got a gig playing the bass at Epcot center one summer and was privileged - and I'll use that term loosely - to play a concert with a Well-Known Jazz Musician who shall remain nameless in case he's so vain as to be googling his name constantly -- which, as I think we all know, is a given when you're talking about musicians. In one of the pieces they were playing, the Well-Known Jazz Musician changed some of the music in the dress rehearsal -- they wouldn't take the repeat marked in the music but rather go on to play the coda and end the piece. During a performance, my friend forgot to make this change and went back to the repeat while the rest of the orchestra played the coda. Every musician makes a mistake like this now and then and in a thirty-five piece orchestra, a few people on stage might notice this, but no one in the audience will ever be the wiser.

However, Well-Known Jazz Musician did hear it and in what I can only assume was a drunken fit of blind rage at the loss of his former fame and a career that was now only big enough to garner a secondary stage at a theme park, stopped and turned to berate the idiot bass player who'd made the mistake. I'll repeat that for emphasis: Well-Known Jazz Musician stopped playing his instrument in the middle of a piece during a crowded performance at Disney and began yelling at the top of his lungs and pointing to my bass player friend, "Play the f*%$ing tag! JUST PLAY THE F*%$ING TAG!" In front of a family friendly Disney audience who sat there next to their children, listening with mouths agape. (And if you didn't believe before that Disney was the evil empire - consider this: they fired my friend for this... NOT the Well-Known Jazz Musician.)

Since then, "Just play the tag" has been a favorite expression in our house, used to describe what we mean when someone should have just done the obvious and not gone overboard.

This is what happens when your husband, who cannot just play the tag to save his own life, uses talcum powder on your child's bottom (watch her diaper closely when she falls):