Johnson and Johnson’s baby oil is basically mineral oil. It’s got a light scent to it, probably done so by the manufacturer to trick your baby into thinking you are doing something pleasant to him or her when using this product on their backside to help prevent diaper rashes. However, this baby oil isn’t limited to use on infants - since the youngest member of my household just turned twelve, my brothers and I have had to concoct creative uses for the bottles of baby oil that inevitably emerge from long-forgotten storage places in the bathroom cabinet and the top of the refrigerator.

Disposing of evidence. Once my brothers and I got into a Bazooka Joe fight - yes, we chewed wads of gum and spat them at each other. Bazooka Joe is one of the stickiest gums in the American market, and makes a great weapon when launched at somebody’s hair.

But, as with all the other cool things my younger siblings and I do, it must come to an end when we hear Mom’s car pulling into the driveway. ’’CRUD! She’s back!’’ we scream. The sudden silence in the living room is overwhelming: It has just dawned on us that we have managed to embed several wads of gum in the brand-new living room carpet. I mutter an expletive and try to think quickly: If Mom sees bright pink wads all over her desert rose carpet, she’s going to have a cow - and then pick up something to club me with, as I’m supposed to be the example for my brothers and sister.

I quickly move into the position of ’’Dictator-slash-evidence-wrecker.’’ My mind runs a million miles an hour. ’’Rebekah, go get that gum out of your hair!’’ I bark at the top of my lungs. I pray that Mom will lock herself in her car - it will buy us some much-needed time. Better yet, perhaps she’ll be temporarily blinded by the sunlight reflecting off the windowpanes, thus rendering her unable to see the mischief we’ve been up to in her absence. But I am no fool: I know good and well that she will be inside the house at any moment.

’’I hope the bathroom’s empty, cause I have to pee like a racehorse!’’ Mom screams as she dashes through the kitchen and into our only bathroom. YES! THANK YOU JESUS!’’

Rebekah jams a baseball cap onto her head: We’ll drag her into my bedroom and remove the gum from her long, dirty-blonde hair later - in the meantime, we hope Mom doesn’t wonder why I was gracious enough to let her wear my treasured Dallas Stars hat.

I look at the gum in the carpet and decide that covering it up will not do: Mom will wonder why we re-arranged all of the chairs in the room. I pick a wad off of the wall and look around. ’’Matthew, get the can of WD-40. There’s no way this gum’s coming up by itself.’’
’’No good, dude. Daniel used it as a flame thrower.’’ Great. Because of a twelve year-old’s need to put a cigarette lighter to the can and whoop at the eight-foot flames that result from his curiosity, I am in trouble.

I run into the kitchen and begin looking around. I spot a rather old, dust-covered bottle of Johnson and Johnson’s baby oil sitting on the top of the refrigerator: Yet another product my entire family has forgotten about entirely. I don’t even know why we still have it, as ’’the baby’’ was almost four feet tall and robbing the Tooth Fairy at least twice a month.

I grab the bottle and run into the living room. Someone had once told me that it works great for lubricating and loosening things, so I figured it was worth a shot.

I poured a small amount of the oil onto a wad of gum in the middle of the carpet and crossed my fingers. YES! The gum loosened and pulled free without taking carpet fibers with it or otherwise wrecking Mom’s pride and joy. But...’’AHH! The stain!’’ Obviously oil on carpet is going to leave discolored spots behind. Great.

’’What now, brainiac?’’ One of my brothers is apparently mocking me. I remind myself to kill him later - that is, if we survive this disaster.

I hurriedly use the oil on the rest of the gum, figuring that spots in the carpet warrants a lesser sentence from my mother than bright pink wads of gum permanently embedded in the fibers.

’’Okay, somebody get me a towel.’’

I blot up the excess oil and sigh. Mom walks into the room just as I finish stashing the bottle and rag behind the television. ’’Hey, Mom. How’d grocery shopping go.’’

’’I’m going to bed. Grocery shoppers give me migraines.’’

She does not even so much as glance at the carpet. We are fortunate. In reality, we should have died on that fateful day but, thanks to my mother’s ill temper and frequent headaches, we were saved. Whew!

While Mom is sleeping, we clean up the baby oil and pretend that nothing ever happened. To this day, she still does not know about the Bazooka Joe fight, the baby oil, or the wad of gum that somehow managed to attach itself to our younger sister’s head.

--

My brothers and I found other trouble to get into while Mom was sleeping that day: Somehow, my little sister’s Barbie doll found her way into the microwave as punishment for running away with G.I. Joe. But, because of Johnson and Johnson’s baby oil, I am alive to tell the story. And, in case you’re wondering, I’ve come up with other, more ’’normal’’ uses for this product.

Obviously it’s great for babies because it’s hypo-allergenic and not likely to cause any sort of reaction. You can use it on almost any part of their skin - just remember it’s not great for eyes or ears. It lubricates, and it also adds a bit of moisture to the skin, which is very soothing for sunburns and rashes.

Sometimes I get a compulsion to stick cotton swabs into my ears. Before I do this, I dip the cotton swab in the baby oil so that I don’t hurt myself. However, I do not recommend that you stick anything into your ear: You could puncture your eardrum or, more often, push the earwax further down into the ear canal. This, of course, means a doctor’s visit to have it flushed - this is probably the worst torture I’ve experienced since shopping for my feminine hygeine products with my brothers.

Sometimes I run out of spray lubricants such as WD-40. It’s much faster to grab the baby oil than it is to get into the car, drive twenty minutes to the hardware store, et cetera. The baby oil helps loosen rusted bolts and nuts, it’s great for my bicycle chain, and it sort of helps clean mechanical parts up a bit so that I can take a better look at them. Obviously it’s not as great as products designed specifically for the purpose, but it does fairly well in a pinch.

You can clean various stains and such with baby oil too. It helps get melted crayons off of car dashboards, for example. Just remember to test the baby oil on a small, concealed part of the surface before you dive in headfirst: Sometimes it leaves a stain that makes attempting it sort of...disastrous.

All in all, baby oil is a fairly versatile product, with many uses - especially if you’re a teenager with an overactive imagination who inadvertently finds herself in all kinds of trouble!

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