Before I had a baby, I was terrified of changing diapers. Why?
I do really poorly with gross stuff and am sensitive to bad smells
I am much more mentally dexterous than physically dexterous
Pop culture is pretty ominous about it, for example, Spongebob:
It seemed like it’d be both difficult and unpleasant, and I’d have to do it all the time.
This was not the case.
In some video games, you have an early run-in with a devastating late game enemy, which inevitably leads to your defeat. The idea is to show you how you’ve grown later, when you are able to defeat them near the game’s climax.
Your baby’s very first diapers are like this. They are filled with exceptionally gross and freaky poop called “meconium,” which is extraor…
Before I had a baby, I was terrified of changing diapers. Why?
I do really poorly with gross stuff and am sensitive to bad smells
I am much more mentally dexterous than physically dexterous
Pop culture is pretty ominous about it, for example, Spongebob:
It seemed like it’d be both difficult and unpleasant, and I’d have to do it all the time.
This was not the case.
In some video games, you have an early run-in with a devastating late game enemy, which inevitably leads to your defeat. The idea is to show you how you’ve grown later, when you are able to defeat them near the game’s climax.
Your baby’s very first diapers are like this. They are filled with exceptionally gross and freaky poop called “meconium,” which is extraordinary sticky and voluminous. If you have your baby in the hospital, all these diapers will be hospital diapers. It’s very difficult to change them without help. You may feel helpless. I did.
But! This is only two or three diapers. And like in the RPG case, after you get owned by an impossible adversary, you are dropped off in a much easier environment. Because once meconium is out of your baby’s system:
Your baby frequently will only poop like once a day
The poop doesn’t smell particularly bad
No, seriously, because it comes from breastmilk or formula and the baby doesn’t have fully developed gut bacteria yet, the smell is mild
There’s an indicator on modern diapers so you know when they’re wet
Merely wet diapers are barely even wet if you get to them fast
You slide a clean diaper under your baby’s dirty diaper, operate some easy adhesive straps to take off the old diaper, wipe the baby with a wipe and some diaper rash cream, yoink the old diaper away, and fasten the new diaper’s straps. Once a day (or so) there’s some poop involved, but again, it doesn’t smell bad.
And it’s like this for months! You have several weeks to get the hang of diapers before poopy ones are more frequent and actually gross. Plus, you may already know the fun bit of trivia that babies can’t roll over for a few months after being born. This is kind of sad in general, but very much your friend during diaper change time.
I mean, yeah, of course. Eventually your baby can roll over mid diaper change, get mad that you’re changing their diaper or preventing them from rolling over, or take their diaper off (this is a sign to put cute teensy baby pants over it, but that means you can’t see the wetness indicator anymore).
Diaper changes aren’t fun, ultimately! There’s a reason they sell novelty coins to flip and establish whose turn it is to change them. But you have multiple months of easy diaper changes before you get to hard diaper changes, such that you already have the skill down by the time it becomes challenging.
Happily, each challenge tends to show up one at a time. Your baby will learn to roll over, which will make diaper changes a little harder. At a different time, they’ll get mad about being stuck on their back. At a different time, they’ll learn to pull their diaper off. And at a different time, poopy diapers will get more frequent and smellier.
But even later on, babies still only poop about as often as adults do. So on average, you probably won’t have more than 2 or 3 poopy diapers a day. It’s not particularly fun, but from Spongebob et al. I sort of assumed that every diaper is a smelly nightmare and there are many per day. But no, only a couple per day are smelly nightmares, and you’ve had months to train up.
The astute reader, or the reader with a sensible axe to grind, might notice that if the first several weeks teach you how to diaper, then whoever changes diapers early on will have a huge advantage in changing them later. I think this dynamic - and similar dynamics around e.g. feeding baby - is part of why sometimes moms get saddled with a hugely disproportionate amount of the work. There are other reasons too, obviously, but I think one piece of the puzzle is something like mom getting much more parental leave and changing the early easy diapers and developing mastery, and dad thus being bad at it and bumbling and messing up and it sort of seeming like he’s messing up on purpose, and so both he and mom developing an ugh field around him doing it, and mom resenting that he never does it, and so on.1
An obvious intervention here is to strive for as much egalitarianism as you want later, as early as possible, even if it feels locally unfair. Like yes, maybe dad has had a long day at work or whatever, and mom is waking up to feed baby every two to three hours anyway2 so she might as well do a quick diaper change, or any number of other excuses. But if you want to overcome the strong default of mom changing most diapers forever, you’re going to have to do unusual stuff, and part of that is overcoming these excuses.
As a prize for reaching the final section of this blog post, I will offer some tips.
Get a changing table. These are elevated structures with a little soft mattress on top, which you can put a sheet on that’s easy to clean if it gets stained. You don’t want to change diapers on the floor all the time, nor on a bed or other surface that really sucks to get bodily fluids on. 1.
Get a diaper pail, and put it near your changing table. These seal better than a normal trash can, so once the diapers do smell really bad (and even the early ones smell pretty bad at very high concentration) you’re protected. 1.
Make sure your diapers have a wetness indicator, and check it often. Our baby has had extremely few blowouts, in part because we do this. 1.
Size up at the early end of the range. Slightly too big diapers can be tightened easily. And it sucks to have a big box of diapers that are a little too small, or to not realize that’s the problem for a while and have sad little red marks on baby’s skin.
I will use this footnote as an opportunity to tearfully confess that I changed only one diaper yesterday, since my family is at a blogging retreat far from home where I am very busy and my wife is supporting me. Rest assured I do feel pretty bad about this, though, and should probably leap to action changing them whenever I’m around in the couple weeks after we get home.
This part does suck so, so bad for mom.
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