Life with a Baby

It’s always interesting how much entertainment a child adds to your life. Life, pre-family, has the tendency to become monotonous at times. Wake up, get ready for work, scoff down some breaky, work eight hours, come home, cook supper, clean up, little R & R, wash up, bedtime, repeat. If you do not make an effort to be creative in what you do during the work days it can be very easy to end up in a rut. With a baby on board sporadic entertainment when you least expect it is a common occurrence. With a baby we have to make an effort to have mommy and daddy time. I have a somewhat sarcastic and childish sense of humour, if you have not come to this conclusion while reading past blog posts. Therefore, the following example of a funny situation involving more doody should not be a surprise (hence the name of the blog). Sometimes when a routine diaper change turns into a massacre, you just have to laugh about it afterwards, when the pain stops…

Triplo Doody

It was a regular spring evening and Isla was about 5 months old. I had just finished putting her to bed around 7pm and all was well in the world. She usually gets up crying for food around 10pm or 11pm. My routine during night time feeds is to give her a kiss on the forehead, lift her out of her crib ever so slightly, lay her on the changing table, whip off the Huggies Snug and Dry diaper, clean up the mess with some Shoppers brand wipes, slap on a fresh diaper, hold her in our wicker rocking chair, and feed her some formula from our favourite Born Free Breeze glass bottles (text version of product placement?). On this particular night when I opened her nursery door a tumbleweed blew past the doorway, a somber wind blew out the door and into the hallway, and you could hear a Western whistle wah wahhing in the background. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in for a gunsling’n shoot-out. When I laid her on that changing table she had a mischievous grin on her cute little button face. I am always powerless to this look and it draws me in with a sudden giddiness as I blow raspberries on her bare belly. In retrospect, I would say there was steam rising from the leg holes of her Huggies. As soon as the velcro lifted a familiar smell took my breath away. Let’s just say that it is not a pleasant smell like a freshly dried pair of trousers pulled from a drying machine. It was the biggest mess she had left me to date. Up the back, all over her onesie, in her hair, on her feet, and even on the ceiling! She began to chuckle as if to say: “good luck cleaning this one up, my bitch!” A few hours later, two empty bags of wipes, a fresh coat of paint on the ceiling, and the job was done. I made sure that cute little buttocks squeaked to the touch. Problem is, no more fresh diapers were accessible… Now there is a crucial time frame between butt cleaning and applying a fresh pair of diapers (I call this “purgatory.” You’re not sure if you’re entering heaven or hell and you’re being judged the whole time). There was a brand new unopened box of 240 Huggies Snug and Dry in the opposite side of the room (received from Amazon family; it’s a sweet deal!). The problem is that the time it was going to take in order to run to that side of the room, pop the top of the diaper box open, rip through the pre-sealed bags of 60 diapers as though a baby calf was drowning in them; was going to push me well over purgatory to the point of no return. Fuck it! I was committed, so I made the trek to the diaper box knowing full well that Isla had her 6 shooter cocked and ready to fire at any moment. I managed to get one diaper free from these unbelievably well sealed bags. The problem was, you guessed it, Isla managed to fire off a round. It made a ricochet sound as it blew past my head while I was in a slow motion back flip of avoidance and I barely escaped the following onslaught with my life. Just as I was ravenously ripping the sealed bag of diapers open, there was just enough elasticity that my elbow whipped back and smashed the top corner of her solid oak dresser. At this very moment I was rolling around on the floor teaching Isla a whole new vocabulary of pleasant words while massaging my “not so funny” funny bone. I swore the bone was now shattered into a hundred pieces. Isla had just started wailing (not sure if it was my screams of agony or that she was just embarrassed about her second mess). So I am yelling in pain while rolling on the floor, Isla is crying and laying in a new pile of shit, and I managed to muster a few encouraging words to her:

“Don’t worry about the mess sweetie, it happens to the best of us, EVERYBODY POOPS! (while tears ran down my face)”

Now I have a throbbing elbow on one side and a mangled bag of 60 diapers on the other side which has exploded all over the floor. I am feeling confident now that I have 60 diapers on stand-by so I lean in close to Isla and whisper in her ear:

“Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?”

Well, as you probably guessed by the title, Isla had another round left in the chamber. I had just gathered my composure after this traumatic experience, finished cleaning up her second pile of smoking shells on the floor, slapped some zinc cream on her freshly cleaned bum, and then it happened… again! It started with the furrowed brow and look on her face like she was trying to solve a related rate calculus equation. There was no more joking at this point and she began to wince while clenching down on her diaphragm. Once you hear that grunting sound (similar to the sound daddy makes when he helps lift uncle Eugene’s full sized slate pool table) and the anus starts puckering, you have again passed through purgatory to enter hell. My first irrational thought during this split second was:

“Should I plug it with my finger? No Evan don’t be an idiot, she’ll explode with all of that back pressure. Just let nature take it’s course and throw your pride out the damn window.”

It was now the third time I had performed a diaper change on my little gunslinger whom I now realized could put some of my proudest toilet productions to shame. The showdown was complete and to say that I lost was an understatement. I was beginning to wonder if Katie had given birth to an alien-like shitting machine who can power a city block with the velocity of her bowel moments. Was her super cute baby exterior just an elaborate disguise? Obviously I was starting to lose my mind a bit. I had just faced an experience I would never forget from a 2 foot tall 15 pound human and the sun was starting to rise in the morning sky. I’ll finally put her to bed and pretend this was all just a dream...

Final Thoughts:

Is it uncool when you are trying to sleep and all you hear over the baby monitor is a full blown fart fest? I mean like 99 balloons were fully blown and let go before a knot was tied. Is it even more uncool that your wife always tries to blame the sounds on your innocent little 5 month old? Just kidding, ninety nine percent of the time that baby lets out full blown, norseman with lactose intolerance, farts. I do not care how old or mature you think you are; a fart sound always gets yah.

Food for thought...