Wanted: Diaper Ninja Warrior

A full night’s sleep still eludes us as Kai still man­ages to stir for a night feed at least once in the night.

And by stir, I mean he cries loud enough to wake the neigh­bours. Doing things while sleep drunk should by now have been sec­ond nature to us, but sec­ond nature it isn’t, and it is still a chal­lenge to keep our wits about us as we carry him from his cot, or when we find that he needs a dia­per change.

I’m already a clumsy fella when I’m awake, so it’s nec­es­sary to snap myself into full baby care mode to make sure Kai’s trans­ported, cleaned and changed with­out too much fuss or dis­com­fort to him.

One thing that I’ve learned over the past cou­ple of months is that in a flash, just like that, one nanosec­ond of a lapse of con­cen­tra­tion, and you will get baby poop every­where. Your shirt, your pants, your hands, your feet, the car­pet, the wall. And when you finally man­age to extract the very soiled dia­per from the squirm­ing baby, you make a new poop trail on the same places.

Worse, when once you had a baby with a full dia­per, you now have one with poop all over his but­tocks, legs and, oh no! Howdahelldiditgetontohishandsohnodon’ttouchyourfacewithit!

This dia­per chang­ing busi­ness is an exer­cise in con­cen­tra­tion and focus. You and your car­pet and what­ever fab­ric you have in your home can­not afford to be com­pla­cent. I’ll be putting up posters to exhort myself not to slacken. It’ll be like those you see for Total Defence or national ser­vice or Dengue:

“Every sec­ond counts. Don’t let poop take over your nurs­ery“

“The soil on my face is poop. My baby’s poop”.

“Poopy room. It is your fight.“

“He who hes­i­tates is lost and has poop all over“