Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Mama Bean is immune to urine, except when it gangs up on her in a big bucket

Holy crap, I have been peed on so many times, I don't even care anymore. I love that the little newborn diapers (Seriously, did he ever actually fit those? I don't think so. They are like doll-sized) have the little bellybutton cut-out so the umbilical stump can heal, but dood, it's also basically a convenient little divet for baby penis to stick up and pee through. I tried putting them on more snugly, and more evenly, and more perfectly. I tried folding his little penis down, which was scary in the first few days, because I was scared of breaking him if I breathed on him too hard, and that particular piece of anatomy seemed especially fragile, or something. It didn't matter what I did, the pee escaped. And since we had to undress him to keep him awake enough to eat, all that pee just trickled freely onto me. Once, twice a feeding. Every three hours. Each Delirious Early Day feels like a week. It took one such week to get over pee. I am immune.

Frankly, I'm not even all that perturbed by the poo anymore. It all just becomes so comical. We will never forget this diaper change, when the poop started slowly, then suddenly erupted into a Fountain of Poop, simultaneous with a Pee Fountain. We couldn't stop laughing; my parents were visiting, and from the kitchen, we must have sounded crazy. This is what I mean by Delirious.

At least with disposables, the pee gets thrown away. Cloth diapers, not so much. The liners from our diapers go in a bucket, where all the pee cooks itself into Super Pee of Doom. There is no escaping the ammonia. I know there are strategies. We could be more consistent about sprinkling baking soda on them. Bleaching the bucket between launderings helps quite a bit. We wash out poo diapers and keep them soaking in a separate bucket. We could rinse all the diapers and keep them soaking, but that feels like several extra steps on top of a diapering process that already requires extra steps, and I am... unwilling. It's diapering, not dancing.

Bean usually wakes up fussy and grumpy, so I feed him right away, and change his diaper after. On Mondays and Fridays, I have to wake him up before I go to work, so the whole process is a little more sleep-deprived than other mornings. For the past two such mornings, he has waited through his feeding, until his sleeper is open, and his diaper is off (he sleeps in disposables. Kid pees a lot at night. I like to throw that pee away) and I've laid out a diaper cover with holder and clean, dry liner, and then. He. Pees.

It's so fun. I love it. I am so happy to start my early morning work days with that. These are precisely the mornings when I have NOT slept in fifteen precious extra minutes, so I have an abundance of time to source a new clean diaper, and clean off the change table mattress cover, and redress his squirmy arms and legs in another sleeper. The responsible mother that I am, I usually give myself extra time, naturally. That's what every good mother does, right?

Then again, that's pee that doesn't end up in the Poison Bucket of Ammoniac Doom. Sooo...there's that. Baby pee just cannot phase me anymore. On the other hand, I still get grossed out by errant pee on the toilet (Papa Bean, I'm looking at you.) At what age does the pee morph from innocuous to disgustnous? I'm just wondering because potty training looms ahead. Right now, the thought of said potty, and having to touch it and clean it, etc. kind of squees me out. Then again, that's what I wondered about diapers. And look how far we've come with that!

3 comments:

  1. FWIW, I always dry pailed, and never added anything except some bac out in the wash every few days and I've gone through two little boys and no stink issues to speak of. Washing every three days or so, and I used pockets with hemp, mf, and cotton inserts. I was an EXTREMELY passive cloth diaper-er.

    As for the pee.........it's when it dries a bit that it becomes sickening. As in......someone *ahem* pees on the floor and it evaporates a bit and becomes more..........concentrated. Sometimes I think I clean more pee from around the toilet bowl than actually gets IN the toilet. *grumble*

    I can't wait until my middle son is old enough so I can make that his chore....

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  2. Ooh Jo, I ♥ your blog! Dylan only peed on us a couple of times. We were fortunate for that. We did have some MAJOR poop explosions though, both with disposable AND cloth diapers! Ooh, some were BAAAADDD!

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  3. Do you have a bag inside your diaper pail? And a lid with a little deodorizer absorbent charcoaly thing? Between those two marvelous inventions, it hasn't been too bad. We keep our wipey cloths soaking in borax and water in a lidded garbage can in the bathroom, and it's semi-tolerable. I barely get up the gumption to wash them once a week, so that's a lot of accumulated stench. And once he's got nice solid food poops happening, it'll be so much better, it won't faze :) you at all.

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