Julie Jay: Bambi Fury isn’t the only baby vampire in town

A clip of Molly-Mae Hague’s and Tommy Fury’s daughter talking about her love of biting has gone viral, but the reality is biting is totally normal for toddlers

Number Two loves nothing more than taking a chunk out of my bottom when I’m standing in the same space for more than two minutes, usually when I’m doing the washing-up.

THIS week, Bambi Fury, daughter of Love Island couple and reality TV royalty Molly Mae Hague and Tommy Fury, set social media alight with a hilarious moment captured in their Manchester apartment that pretty well sums up life with a toddler.

The viral clip in question opens with Bambi casually informing her influencer mother: “I’m going to bite someone.” As Molly-Mae coaches her through the mental gymnastics involved in processing that we should use teeth only on foods, not friends, Bambi proceeds to name her next snacks — her nursery peers.

“We bite Emily. We bite … Dory,” this baby Bram Stoker muses, much to the horror of her mother, who continues to talk her down.

“We bite …” Bambi continues, her eyes looking to the ceiling in a mock-ponder, as Molly-Mae is surely silently pleading with the universe that she finishes the sentence in “biscuits”.

“We bite … different Dory,” she finally decides, and at this point, we’re not even entirely sure she is saying Dory. Is she referring to a child called Story? While nobody can be fully sure either way, Mancunians named Story are surely sleeping with one eye open regardless.

But of course, Molly-Mae can rest assured her child is not the only vampire in town. Biting epidemics are du jour in most crèche situations, and, while I’m not an expert (I know the weekly wisdom of this column might suggest otherwise), to me it all feels pretty normal.

Before having kids, I would have heard many conversations about biting as I met parent-friends over tapas.

“Timmy came home with bite marks,” one mammy friend would announce morosely, “we’re seriously considering a tetanus shot.”

I would proceed to do my best impression of what a concerned friend might say while simultaneously focusing my attention on the last remaining arancini ball, and mentally doing the maths on how this would be divided among the five diners present.

Such a declaration would, more often than not, act as a green light to others sharing their horror stories of similar biting attacks.

I recall a friend who, using her keen diplomatic skills, managed to corner some poor, unassuming crèche worker in the supermarket after her little guy came home with a tooth imprint on his upper arm. Through clever breadcrumbing of information nuggets, she managed to discern that her child had been the victim of a serial offender.

Though she spent a lot of time fretting about the psychological impact of having been on the receiving end of some unwelcome gnashers, she needn’t have worried, because the two children quickly became bosom buddies, Blood Brothers, if you will, given that the friendship glue had come in the form of her son returning a chomp one morning, and they never looked back. With that, a mutual respect was earned, and now these two scallywags are in secondary school and biting nobody due to their jaws being somewhat restricted (I promise they haven’t been muzzled, they’ve just gotten braces).

Bambi Fury isn’t the only gnasher terrorist leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. On more than one occasion, my toddler has bitten me in the bum, and I don’t mean that figuratively. Number Two loves nothing more than taking a chunk out of my bottom when I’m standing in the same space for more than two minutes, usually when I’m doing the washing-up.

Like a white-shark attack, I never see it coming, oblivious to the fact that if this scene made the feature film of my life, it would be accompanied by the ominous soundtrack of Jaws.

If he has bitten anyone outside of his immediate family, I have yet to hear about it, so hopefully we can keep the nibbles to immediate family members only in future. A few bites between siblings is nothing, but friendships shouldn’t have to end with a tetanus shot.

Usually, his older brother is the other victim on the receiving end of a nibble, so we can only presume that he only bites his favourites.

Unlike Bambi Fury, who seems to structure her day around who she will be biting and when, my toddler has only dabbled in vampire behaviour, but if the nibbling starts to bleed out to other innocent bystanders, I will have no choice but to have the chat about how we don’t bite people, we bite croissants. And if this does come to pass, much like Molly-Mae, we can only hope that this, like everything else, is but a passing phase. 

However, when it comes to it, I know that Molly Mae and I will be fine, because ultimately, when it comes to these baby Draculas, their bark is nearly always worse than their bite.