Infanticide isn’t that serious, surely?

INFANTICIDE isn’t that serious, surely? On the league table of capital crimes it would have somewhere down around eight or nine.

Especially when the victim is anything from two to three years old.

I mean, they’re cute until they’re two, then something happens to them. I think they get hijacked by alien beings.

Back in the days when your average peasant believed in witches, there was a general belief that the fairies snuck in and stole good children, leaving changelings in their place. Identical beings in every way except that they have personalities like the creatures from The Alien.

The way you found out was, you threw the kid on the fire. If it flew up the chimney it was a changeling, and if it were really your own it burned to death.

And before you mock the irony of this quaint rustic logic just consider this – if the little bastard has developed a personality like an inter-galactic flesh eater, then who cares which it is as long as it’s gone!

I have two, with barely 15 months between them. Not mine exactly. They call them grandchildren, though I have yet to work out what’s grand about them.

And it ought to be a crime punishable by an afterlife in a used nappy factory to have two children barely 15 months apart. But that’s all right. My daughter, who is the perpetrator of this cardinal sin, is already living in a used nappy factory and she’s not even dead yet.

Serve her right!

They work as a team. In shifts. Night shifts. One wakes up howling fit to wake the dead and the other sleeps the sleep of the innocent, and when you finally coax the one to sleep, closing the door gently behind you with the faintest of clicks, the other one snaps bolt upright and screams until the dead awaken.

The dead, but not his sister, who will sleep through until it’s her turn.

These are definitely changelings… surely no one could blame me for chucking them on the fire? I mean, it’s only a minor infanticide. More a self-preservation instinct, really.

“Makememilkandhoney!Makememilkandhoney!Makememilkandhoney!

“Notinthatcup!Notinthatcup!Notinthatcup!”

“Mummydoit!Mummydoit!Mummydoit!”

What happened?

Six months ago they were sweet. They chuckled when I did my famous funny face, which has amused children for the past 40 years. If I sang Rock-a-bye Baby they dutifully fell asleep. They knew the rules and they followed them, like all good children do.

Now they are out to get me. I am 60 years old and I am fighting – if not for my life, then at least for my sanity – against two adversaries whose combined years don’t yet total five!

And because they are too young to remember anything except how to consume and expel food, I don’t even get any brownie points for all the love and devotion I have lavished on them since they were born.

Basically, I am the barrier between them and their own way. That’s all they want, really… their own way. What’s amazing is that they get it.

I’m told they’ll get better as they get older and develop more sophisticated social skills.

But that never changed John Howard.

Oh my God — perhaps I am doing battle with two of the future leaders of the Australian nation.

In that case they’re definitely going on the fire.