I hope you aren’t too full from your meal, or on your way to some fine dining right now. You can probably guess from the title what this is about. Trust your instinct.
Look, I’m not waking up every day thinking of ways to upset people’s appetites. But these are parts of babies’ lives, hence their parents’ lives, hence now parts of their parents’ blogs. I’ll try and leave the graphical details out of this post. Instead, I trust that your imagination should suffice to render the necessary scenes with spectacular accuracy. So, ye be warned.
The truth is, I’m more amused by these incidents than anything. Sure, there was a lot of panic (plus other emotions) in the air as they happened, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the situation or myself afterward. So I thought, why not share the laughter?
Changing Table Olympics
During the first month of babies’ life, their stools (yeah, we are diving right in) are usually soft and sometimes watery. That’s totally fine because that’s why we have diapers, one of the most amazing inventions that we take for granted yet hugely improve our quality of life. The real problem is that their No. 2’s can be frequent and unpredictable. So we can’t quite coordinate them to go only when the diaper’s on. You see where I’m going.
They say, “Treasure every moment”, but somehow the moments most saliently saved in my mind are not so rosy or peachy. One of those moments that replay with vivid details was when I unwrapped the diaper and found her to be a “gift that kept on giving”. It lasted so long that I wasn’t sure if I was changing her diaper or squeezing a tube of toothpaste.
Other times, the surprises could be a lot more “far-reaching”. Each piece of evidence was clearly visible on the changing table with varying distances reached, much like in Olympics long jump matches. They get cleaned up after each round, mostly, except for the record holder that launched over the entire length of the changing table, across the chasm of the Diaper Genie, and masterfully onto my desk. I didn’t see the stain until a couple of days later.
Spit-Up Mystery
Babies spit up all the time, and for many reasons. The primary cause is their underdeveloped esophageal sphincter which keeps their food down. Imagine with me a bottle of water with a loose cap. Now tilt it over.
Okay, it’s not that bad. And it’s supposed to improve over time, with emphasis on “supposed to“. Mine is still spitting up all kinds of delightful surprises all the time, especially if we don’t give her at least 20 minutes of burping and settling time after each feeding. The end results are puddles scattered across our apartment (or our clothes) like murder mystery evidence. “When did this happen?” “How did that get here?” “Whodunit?” (Although the last one is not much a mystery.)
A successful burping attempt gets the air out while keeping the liquid down. That was not what happened today. Just as I picked her up and laid her on my shoulder to get started, stuff came out. No problem, not my first rodeo. I had already prepared a burp cloth over my shoulder to catch any mishaps, so no harm, no foul, right? I quietly congratulated myself, only to turn around and find a long and wet blotch streaming down the couch as if it was bleeding from a stab wound. It wasn’t red so, phew, but that must have been one impressive squirt.
Beyond Wildest Imagination
Cleaning the couch took a while but that was far from the worst. It turned out I didn’t even possess the imagination for the worst. It happened a long long time ago on a day called yesterday. After almost a full day of errands and a satisfying nap, I was eager to pick up my daughter and play with her for a while. Before I continue, there’s something you should know about me. I have a phobia of milk. Not just intolerance, but an outright revolting phobia. Okay, now let’s begin.
Perhaps I got a little too excited when I lay on my back and hugged her to my chest, and what transpired next was simultaneously logical and hysterical. Time slowed down. I detected a shift in my daughter’s expression. Her bright and shiny smile precipitated into a solemn stare. Her head tilted back ever so slightly as her mouth opened, which by the way, was directly above mine.
Without any delay, a viscous pocket of liquid revealed itself and was destined to follow the spacetime curvature straight to my face. I had only a fraction of a second to turn my big smile into a tightly sealed gate. It was a race to the finishing line. She had a significant headstart on me, but I wasn’t about to give up.
As I summoned all my facial muscles to a single-minded focus, while my mind was tearing itself apart trying to comprehend the whole turn of events in the time too short for even a word of prayer, I found myself inevitably falling short in the futile struggle against physics itself. Now, I will kindly spare you the rest of the story.
~ Du