There are lots of things I could discuss in this blog only weeks after the birth of a second child into our growing empi-, er , family. Deep, meaningful subjects that would likely spur furious but polite debates for months to come in the comments section of this blog. Concepts run the gamut from large to small, here's a short list of some blog entries I thought about writing about:
• The confidence of being on the second child
• Sibling rivalry, day 1
• How a hospital treats a new dad.
• The household division of labour
• Home, baby, work, cleaning, cooking, maintaining, entertaining, and you.
• Attitudes people immediately have about boys vs. girls
• How to unhear a screaming baby.
• Things to do with one available hand at 3:00 A.M.
• Grandmas and Grandpas: a Love Letter
• Colic is a myth.
• Oh God how are we ever going to pay for this on just my salary if only the readers of my irregularly updated blog would just send us massive gobs of money we could afford to eat occasionally and what ever will we do if the car breaks down or the house needs maintenance we're doomed that’s it just doomed. (Alternatively titled : "Interesting recipes involving instant noodles and water.)
• Hand me downs
• Don't shake the baby Vol II.
I was very seriously considering writing Don't Shake the Baby: Vol. II (but really that would have been just me posting pictures of cement mixers, paint shakers, and jackhammers to make myself feel better) , when it hit me full on in the face.
Pee.
After cleaning myself off and desperately trying to save the laptop from watery doom, I put the boy's diaper back on and said "to hell with it with all that deep crap, I'm going to write about crap!"
Or, perhaps more universally, bodily fluids. Odds are good that if you're actually taking the time to read this and not just skimming it to make the author feel better, you've had most of life's available bodily fluids spilled, splashed, dashed, sloshed, or dropped on you voluntarily or involuntarily (and hey, who am I to judge?) at some point in your adult life. It's even possible that if you look back and make a tally, most of those are probably your own! Good for you!
then.
now.
look how far you've come!
Most often, you will find yourself coming in contact with urine. Urine, as far as the soon to be discussed subjects go, is the least offensive of the lot. It is sterile, generally not foul smelling, and comparatively easy to clean. It’s a damn good thing too, because you'll be positively bathing in the stuff before your newborn is a few months old.
Kids pee. A lot. Newborns, in particular, pee when they are cold. The #1 time a newborn is cold, is when the diaper is removed, therefore, evolution has conspired for the perfect set of circumstances to completely ruin any and all of your shirts before you leave the house on a Monday morning.
One is told stories, myths, legends even, of what it is like when a baby boy pees. It is said that dams are broken, flood waters rise, and species are eliminated from the face of this now yellowed Earth. So deep seated is this fear that there actually exist products to attempt to prevent you from drowning. These are, however, really dumb. We were lucky, we thought, we had a girl first.
What no one tells you is that girls are nearly as deadly. The same confluence of events occurs and you find yourself with a diaper in one hand, while your other is thrust before you trying desperately to keep the spray from hitting your face or filling your shoes. You see, no one sex has a moratorium on bodily fluids, despite what those dirty websites might imply.
The difference between baby boys and baby girls however, isn't the volume of the stuff, its in the projection (which right there probably explains a significant portion of the history of relations between the sexes). Boys don't just have simple tube there, it's a precision instrument ultimately designed to fling fluid as far as is physically possible. Because of this, your dodge pattern is all messed up from changing girl diapers and honestly you can never expect where the spray will go. It's like in cartoons when a fire hose would get turned on and just start to whirl around soaking everything except the fire. Only, you know, its pee.
ohgod there is pea everywhere
Of course pee isn't the only thing that will be fired, launched even, from your new child. No, that would be far too easy. Instead, you'll be treated to a whole new milieu of substances!
Children can, for example, actually projectile vomit. Now to give you some hope for your future, if you're planning on spending time around a child, this is a rare occurrence, and should it happen the poor thing should be taken to a doctor immediately. Projectile vomiting is one of those things written into things like "What to Expect the First Year" that a person who has not had a child for a significant amount of times looks at and says to themselves "This is not a real thing, this doesn't actually happen." I mean, you remember Freshman year, right? You know what throwing up is. Why do they bother calling it projectile vomit instead of simply "vomit"? When it happens, you will know.
There will be no doubt in your mind. No doubt on your shirt. No doubt on your pants, your couch, the walls behind the couch, Grandpa, nor any small furry animal who happens to have the unfortunate luck to be in the house at the time. Doubt itself will have had the good sense to have left the room seconds before your adorable little baby transforms in less than a second from the one you know and love to something resembling a broken fire hydrant.
We originally had a "Home Game" section here, but I finally admitted that honestly, there is nothing that can prepare you for this.
an unforgettable experience to be sure
It is amazing though, what a person can get used to, and what they can't. Several of my non-parent friends have expressed both fascination and horror that my wife and are able to stomach (as it were) changing diapers. The studied response to this is "It's different when it's your kid." which is by all means true. Changing your own child's diaper is somehow very different than mis-stepping in a downtown alleyway and finding the results of a stranger's bran muffin bender. It's a significantly more pleasant experience than one might otherwise imagine getting your face inches from human feces might be. But perhaps the statement can be made more accurate and more descriptive by changing the emphasis and saying instead, "It's different when it's your kid."
Even as a parent, few and far between are the people who aren't just as disgusted as you are when their finger slips through the 1-ply in the airport restroom, the major difference is that a parent probably has disinfectant wipes on-hand.
So why then, isn't a parent as grossed out as they should be when changing a diaper? Perhaps its because we're largely in charge of determining what goes into the kid in the first place (excepting rocks, slugs, small bits of fluff from the carpet, and Lego bricks). Breastfed babies are the easiest. Milk goes in one end, something vaguely spoiled milk-like comes out the other. Really at that stage its less like the kid is an animal eating and pooping and a whole lot more like the worlds least exciting luge track. Formula fed babies smell worse, but are otherwise functionally the same.
Things change, however, when you start feeding your children solid foods. This is when the kid's product goes from a mustard-esque sticky cream to a semi-solid, foul smelling, creeping-crawling pile of dark essence, determined to do whatever it can to attach itself to your flesh long enough to travel, sap-like, into your nice white carpet.
But really, in the back of your head, you know that despite its costuming as the devils own tile spackle, you know its really just a smashed composition of cheerios, goldfish crackers and apple juice anyway, so you plug your nose and get to work.
baby diapers, the home game
Not knowing makes all the difference. Hell I don't remember what I had for breakfast today, let alone yesterday morning. Whatever is coming out of me is certainly a combination of things I never ever wanted to see again. That's half the reason I ate it in the first place, to make it suffer.
This is then magnified when encountering "strange poop" that of someone who's diet is a mystery to you. Add in the fact that most sane people (read: people without kids) don't tend to encounter poop on a regular basis, and its easy to understand why people are disgusted by the stuff.
But hey, just because you don't have kids (or have grown up kids) doesn’t mean you need to feel left out. With my simple guide, you too can re-create the baby experience without all that nasty, uncomfortable, sticky sexual reproduction.
Just follow the below instructions, and you can grin at your friends who are parents and tell them that they can't whine to you anymore about how hard it is because NOW YOU KNOW!
Level I. Newborn:
1. Empty your bank account
2. Purchase diapers with your debit card knowing you'll have to just pay the overdraft fee.
3. Purchase a small, squeeze bottle of mustard
4. On returning home, pour mustard from bottle into a small, quart sized bowl.
5. Carefully measure one (1) rounded tablespoon of mustard, and return it to the bottle. Tighten lid.
6. Discard bowl of mustard
7. Wrap diaper clumsily around bottle, as a drunk might wrap MadDog 20/20 at 2 am on a Saturday night.
8. Place bottle/diaper on a flat, floor level surface carpeted bedrooms work well for this.
9. Weighing either 150 lbs, or finding someone who does, jump on bottle.
10. The resulting spray will likely blow the diaper clean across your room, spattering a thin layer of mustard in an arc not unlike a Jackson Pollock painting. Contemplate what you have done to deserve this.
11. Didn't you feed the mustard bottle?
12. Didn't you care for it?
13. You bought it clothes, and keep it warm right?
14. As you attempt to clean the harrowing mess, contemplate how exactly you went from being the clever, cute guy at parties to being on your hands and knees, wrist deep in shi- er, mustard.
No comments:
Post a Comment