Those of you with weak stomachs may want to click away now, for today my topic of discussion is: (cue diabolical music)……poopy diapers! This is on my mind because Baby Edward has just recently started on the solid foods and, as they say, what you eat is what you excrete. At least they should say that. It’s kind of catchy.
Being on an all liquid diet for the first five months of his life, you can imagine the kind of diaper fun there is to be had. I did not enjoy this phase. We’ve had several five-alarmers, usually at other people’s houses (or church), where, let’s just say the water table rose above ground level and there was some flooding. And you can’t sandbag poop.
Naturally I thought, ‘Boy, won’t it be nice when he starts eating real food and we don’t have to deal with this crap (literally) anymore.’ This is because, as part of evolution, nature makes us forget things about diapers. If we remembered in great detail the various stages of diaper duty that come with babies, the human race would quickly die out. We would have to turn over the keys to our civilization to the dolphins, because they do not wear diapers.
Solid food diapers seem like a much better idea in theory. They are more contained and less likely to inflict themselves on strollers, church pews, and visiting relatives. Unfortunately, instead of going from a liquid to a soft solid-like state, they often require chisels and putty scrapers to remove. The only way to really be sure that the baby is poop-free after one of these diapers is to place them in a blast furnace, but we don’t have a blast furnace, so instead I have to use anywhere between five and infinity+1 baby wipes, and scrub so hard I feel like I am scrubbing away most of the baby’s butt. By the way, scrubbing your butt with baby wipes does not make any of it go away, trust me.
Now that we are in phase two of the doody duty, I am longing for phase three, in which we begin potty training. But if I really think about it, that is crazy. Potty training is not fun, it is horrible. Nobody likes it, it’s actually messier than diapers for a while, and probably causes trauma for life. For the parents. So why would I hope for that? Why don’t I remember how icky every step of the way is on the corner of Diaper Drive and St. Potty Place? I don’t know. I guess you can ask Darwin about that.