Warning – do not buy pullover onesies for kids under 1-year-old unless you are 110% sure you have successfully put on a diaper correctly. (A pullover onesie is a shirt that goes through the head with buttons to close on the bottom.) 7-month-old Izzy managed to scar me for life with the below incident.
You have been warned.
While playing with Izzy on the mat, a strong scent penetrated my nose. I sniffed her butt. It was stinky. Yay! This is a good sign; paranoid moms like myself made sure their children have bowel movements regularly.
BUT what I didn’t realize was that the liquidy sludge had escaped the diaper and hiked up her back.
Frantically, I picked her up and ran to the changing table. What should I do first? Take off her clothes? Cut the shirt up? Izzy smiled at me. She seemed pretty content – leave her be?
My plan of attack was to take off her shirt, wipe her back, then change her diaper. I sprang into action.
First, I dug in between the feces-covered thighs to unbutton the shirt and then rolled the shirt inwards.
Then, the scariest step – I tried to pull the shirt over her head (drum roll, please!). If this were a sleeping baby, it would’ve been easy to carefully pull each hand out and then widen the collar before pulling the shirt over the head. But this was a squirming baby that just learned to roll over but still couldn’t stand yet. By the time I got her shirt off, pieces of feces scattered the changing table and hung onto her thin hair.
She also decided this was the best time to move her head from side to side.
I declared, “It is bathtime again.” After taking off her diaper and wiping the remaining excretions off her body, I ran to the bathroom with my palms cupping her bottom and plopped her into the bathtub. Daddy always seems to plan the grocery trips at the right moment; he won’t get away easily this time. We hummed and enjoyed bathtime as we waited for Daddy to come home and clean up the dirty shirt and piles of wipes still having a dance party on the changing table.