The joys of parenting a diaper-free baby

[wayfaringwordhack]

2:50 a.m.: Wake to full breasts; happily note S is stirring and wants to eat

3:00 : S finishes first breast; sleepily hold her over the bowl and am pleased to catch a big pee.

3:02 : Foregoes a cloth diaper, which she usually wears to bed, thinking I can be vigilant and catch pees all night and lays S on the puddle pad to give her second breast

3:15: S is fidgety and won't stay on the breast; try to burp her then hold her over the bowl again. Nothing.

3:30: S is verrry awake and excitable

3:35: Hold over bowl again, knowing she's got to go. Still nothing. Try burping. Nothing.

3:38-3:59: Wonder when the little Live Wire is going to run out of juice.

4:00: Hear baby pass gas; put hand out to steady myself to turn on the lamp; put hand directly in hot poop. Scramble to sit up; get poop all the way to elbow and onto the edge of the duvet.

4:01: Get light turned on.  Feel something warm on leg and see that S has finally peed and it has leaked off the plastic we put beneath the puddle pads and onto the sheets...

4:40: Finally have a clean baby, a clean me, get my bedding sorting and a fresh puddle pad ready, still not prepared to diaper her.  Lay baby down, turn off lights. S starts squirming again. I check and see that she has peed.  Again...

And where is J in all of this?  Away on deployment, naturally. :P

In case it doesn't come through in the post, I was actually laughing about the whole thing. It was very Murphy's Law.  If you are going to try natural infant hygiene, go into it with your sense of humor intact.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

How old is she now?

I love it when they are wanting to nurse and you are wanting to nurse, and then you both come together--ahhh!

(No-diaper sounds harder than proponents make it sound, but you've been doing it now for a while--is it mainly working okay?)

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

She's one week shy of three months. Wow, almost three months. Time really does fly sometimes...

Doing without diapers means you have to be on your toes all the time, be very attentive. And be prepared to do a lot of laundry. :P We have lots of misses, but we just laugh about them; and even though we've been doing this from the beginning, we are still tickled at every success. I'm definitely not ready to give up. :)

[frigg.livejournal.com]

And this is the post you will show her when she's 10-years-old and refuses to pop down to the grocer when you run out of flour while baking bread. :p

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

You've got that right! :P

[sunflower-sky.livejournal.com]

Gah. Don't know how you do it. Having a young baby is hard enough! But I bet it's kind of like nursing; much harder than bottle-feeding at first, but it pays off later in a number of ways. Especially when the poop starts getting gross from solids. (And, well, saving the planet and all.)

I agree with asakiyume though; proponents do tend to make it sound easy as pie. Well yeah, just watch your kid every second of the day, what's so hard about that? :P

~D

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is hard, and tiring, especially at first, and at the beginning it felt like too much with the problems we were having with breastfeeding and the constant watching of Soëlie's weight. Now, though, I feel like everything is coming together. We aren't seeing a lot of pay-off for the moment, but I'm hoping that when the time comes when she is big enough to go to the potty herself, we'll be ahead of the game.

[kmkibble75.livejournal.com]

There's not quite enough words to describe the amount of nastiness involved there...

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

*lol* At the risk of sounding like one of those parents who thinks everything Junior does is golden, it was pretty funny. I had myself a good laugh.