There's no avoiding spit when you live with a toddler. Salivary juices can also be a problem with lisping three-year-olds, but few organisms produce the vast quantities of fluid my son Dylan discharges in the course of a typical day.

Our household spit levels were controllable until just a few short weeks ago. We used to own a pair of huskies, Franny and Zooey. Huskies are like dogs except that their brains are the size of raisins and our beloved pets were at the low end of the curve when it came to intellectual capacity. It is a little known fact that a husky's favorite beverage is baby spit. Franny and Zooey would fight to the death to establish territory around a teething baby. Leave one of those little drool factories on the floor and next thing you know, Zooey is French kissing the neighbor's pride and joy. It's the kind of thing that can break up a coffee klatch faster than oatmeal and housefly cookies.

So when Keiran was teething and producing a virtual cascade of drool, my wife Darcy and I had nothing to worry about. Every five minutes or so a dog would amble through the room and lick the boy's chin saving enormous wear and tear on the furniture and carpets.

Since we now live in a husky-free environment, Dylan's oral issue is, to say the least, an issue. Although our youngest son vomits on the rug less often than Franny and Zooey did, he more than makes up for that shortcoming, often sporting a chin-string of salvia which flows uninterrupted for hours.

Before a child begins to walk - at roughly the one year mark - most parents start patting each other on the back and saying unbelievably stupid things like, "Hey, we've got this baby thing licked," and "See, I knew it would get easier." And for a while it seems that way. You plop the kid on a highly absorbent blanket and he just lies there drooling and occasionally rolling off onto the rug. Life seems easy for the first time after a year of pure hell. This period lasts approximately two days

Suddenly ... without warning ... Dylan was walking or, to be more exact, teetering around the house like a wet sponge after a whiskey incident. Unlike his older brother, Stickboy, Dylan has the body and attitude of a pro wrestler. As though it isn't bad enough that he leaves a big wet patch on my trousers every time I get a leg hug, playtime with Dylan now has all the appeal of Jello rugby.

And it is exactly this heinous combination of bipedal locomotion and voluminous slobber that has wrested control of my television. For reasons that have never been apparent to me, our television came with a little baby remote as well as the man-sized channel-surfer. The little remote, sans batteries, was enough to satisfy the precocious surfing behavior of the older brother Keiran; he would point and click happily imagining he was switching scenes or commercials. But Dylan knows he is being ripped off. His remote has no batteries and he can't raise the volume up to level 40 without that juice.

Thus, aside from saturating our wall-to-wall carpeting, Dylan's chief mission in life is to acquire the big remotes and short out the wiring with spit. As a healthy normal male, I feel the need to change channels about once every two to four minutes, but much of the pleasure has gone out of surfing our cable package since the clicker became permanently drenched. And even when it isn't wet on the outside, the remote barely works. I am now faced with getting up out of my chair and changing channels at point blank range which has even further reduced the pleasure I expected when I purchased my large screen television.

My great fear is that the remotes, the TV one and the one that operates the VCR, will just stop functioning altogether leaving me stuck on the 24-hour All-Barney Network.