by Nda Nxumalo

Created on: February 18, 2009

Just yesterday, a friend of mine wrote a note to share on the popular on-line social website, Facebook.
She tells of how she was busy working on some travel documents of hers in preparation for an upcoming trip in April this year. While she was doing that in the one room, her two younger children were in the same room with her. She kept tabs on them with the occasional reprimand, a grimace here and there, and an odd yell or two: "Leave your sister alone!"

After a while, she got so engrossed in what she was doing that she lost tabs on what her twosome were up to. When she took the time to assess the situation, it was in time to see her son, the older of the two children, come into the room from goodness-knows-where.
His 10-month old sister was nowhere in sight. My friend's heart skipped a beat as she instinctively called out for her daughter.

There was no response.

Instinctively, my friend then called out to her mother, the toddler's grandmother, who was in the same premises, but elsewhere in the house, inquiring if she was with her. "No, she isn't," came back the sickeningly distressing response.

My friend promptly got up to begin combing the house for her child, and she checked her parent's room first.
Her father was in there, chatting away on the phone. No toddler in sight. She went out from there, still searching and happened to pass the open toilet door.
"Thank God the toilet seat is down," she worryingly mulled to herself, but, just to be on the safe side, she still walked in and peeked under the toilet seat. In her own words: "Of course, [her] baby was not in there."

At this point, I remember sitting to ponder this matronly search for a precious bundle of feminine joy, only 10-months young. For the life of me, I could not remember being discovered down the toilet bowl when I was about that age. May I rephrase that? Even if I had had such an unfortunate experience, to put it mildly, there would have been copious records of it in the annals of my family history, and no such annals exist. I must have been a gem of a bundle of masculine, bouncing joy!

With a sharply rising sense of panic, my friend started heading towards the staircase, worried sick that her daughter might have come of age and had the novel idea to descend that dizzying height all by herself. According to her, her daughter sometimes ascended that flight of stairs, under adult supervision. I am not sure if I should add the emphatic phrase "of course" at this point, for nowadays' parents are infamous

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