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all about poop

May 27, 2004

for those of you with queasy stomachs at the mention of any type of body fluid, or not so fluid fluid, and for those of you who hate parents who only talk about their kids poop, stop reading now. i have just had a horrific 30 minutes, and i'm using this to vent.

this morning brian donned seb with a soft, brand new white diaper. yes, today is the first day of the cloth diapering adventure. we lauded the joy of using a contour diaper (no fighting with folding a bulky square of cloth) made of soft organic cotton. we discussed how much more comfortable seb would be in them. he looked so cherubic in the pillowy, softness. then we took seb downstairs to play and eat breakfast, and before we knew it, seb was working on a poo.

brian promptly left for work. oh joy.

i decided not to put off the deed and took seb upstairs to change the new, white diaper. how bad could it be really? seb is eating solid food now. for the most part, his poo is usually left for us in a nice managable package. well, i don't know WHAT this kid ate yesterday, but something went horribly, horribly wrong. to say the least, the diaper was not even close to being white anymore. in fact, there was poo EVERYWHERE. poo had found its way out of every possible space in the diaper AND the diaper cover. it was as if seb had reverted to his days of only breastfeeding. no, nothing solid about this poo. no package necessary, apparently.

by the time i had seb cleaned up and clothed in a new, bright, shiny, cloth diaper and placed in his crib (wailing at the top of his lungs for freedom the ENTIRE time) for safekeeping, i realized that the work had only just begun. i now had to deal with the poo-covered diaper--something i had not really had to deal with before. oh my. the websites that give you a step by step on how to clean cloth diapers don't give advice for the messy pooper. they say things like, knock stool into toilet and place in diaper pail. my question: what if the poo isn't the knocking-off type? the poo that i had to deal with this morning was not letting go of that new, soft diaper without a fight. well, i fought and flushed and fought and flushed and fought and flushed... i'm still not sure who won that match. at some point i just quit fighting and flushing and wrung the thing out and hid it away in the diaper pail liner. oh yeah, and that's another thing. if you think you can get away with starting the whole cloth diapering thing without all the accoutrements (pails, pail liners, deodorizers), take it from me, you're sorely mistaken. yeah, so upstairs is a scary, smelly diaper and cover stashed away in a liner without a pail or a deodorizer. wanna come over?

that about wraps up my 30 minutes of poo hell, without talking about the feeling of poo squishing through my fingers... i'm trying not to take this as a sign from God himself that i am not cut out for using cloth diapers. i'm trying to take is as a challenge to keep going even in the face of peril. I WILL USE CLOTH DIAPERS, I WILL!! *shakes fist towards the sky*

*whew* i feel a bit better now.

seb update

May 25, 2004

well, it's time i update this thing... hmmm. what to tell, what to tell. there is so much going on--seb is nearly a toddler, we're living in our very own home, the price of gas is obscene. it's been hard to find the right time to sit down and write. heh, right time to write.... heh. anyway...

seb has decided that turning 12 months old is a big deal. almost from the moment he hit this age, he has been doing new and amazing things on a daily basis. it's as if he woke up the morning of may 12, and said to himself, "well, now that i'm 1, it's time i started acting like it." i think the first new item on the list of "new things to do on my birthday" was meowing like a cat. so i, or anyone else can say, "hey seb, what's a kitty-cat say?" and he replies, "meow." the second item was to make car sounds, which was very appropriate since he received many cars or car-like things as gifts. it's a sort of *vroom vroom* sound while he wheels his mini cars all over the first floor of the house. and he has become fairly adept at crawling on one hand while pushing the car with the other hand without having to pick that pushing hand up off the floor. impressive. i'm trying to get him to differentiate between the sound a car makes and other things--"a train goes chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga choo-choo, seb." i caught him one day this week "driving" his favorite peice of toast around on his highchair tray. i'm not sure he quite gets it yet.

one thing seb has not eschewed since his first birthday as being infantile, and i truly wish that he would, is the whole drooling thing. he's a mess most of the time, a big dark spitty stain on the front of his clothes if he's wearing them, a sticky stream running down his chest and belly into his diaper if he's not. and i've realized lately that most kids his age have the drool monster under some semblance of control, only letting it out of its cage when their teeth come in. not seb. i'm trying to come to terms with this fact: seb IS the drool monster. he is not aware of the "teething rule".

ah yes, and this is the week i have chosen to return to the world of cloth diapering. this time, instead of using a service, i'm doing it myself. i figure, if i buy all the diapers and covers and detergent, etc., i'll be sure to stick with it (right?). this way too, i can get the cool contour diapers and the all-in-one diapers and the hemp diapers. in a very sick way, i am just as satisfied after a good day of cloth diaper shopping for seb as i am clothes shopping for myself. there must be something wrong with me.

birthday update

May 18, 2004

fire! fire! (mama is attempting to blow out the fire before the finger gets to it--one of a couple fire catastrophies i was able to avoid. the other involved the entire house.)

mirror, mirror, up against the wall, who's the cutest one-year-old of them all?

seb grew a lot of brain on his birthday and decided to put together all his toys himself!

the novelty of the playthings on the front of the walker was too much of a distraction to actually walk with it... that wore off in a day or two and now he cruises.

we are proud to report that seb ate 90% of his birthday cake.

and we let him eat cake

May 13, 2004

more b'day pics later...