I've mentioned before my brother-in-law's principle that you can tell an involved father from an uninvolved one by saying "five-wipe diaper," and seeing if he says, "What's that?"
I thought: you are so wasteful. Use one side, fold it over, use one side of that, fold it over, keep going till it's the size of your big toe, and you won't need more than two. Maybe three.
That was before Monday night.
I was doing something at the church and the nursery worker came to get me. She said Liam was wet and his bag had no diapers in it. True, but the nursery had some Dora the Explorer diapers, which I am not posting a picture of because Liam's manliness might never recover. But by time I was there he was more than wet.
It made it outside the cloth diaper, outside the diaper cover, outside the onesie, and onto his pants. It was from his ankles to his midriff. It got onto the changing table cover. Everything he was wearing was tainted with brown. As I washed out the diaper, I counted 6 baby wipes I'd used. I was very relieved the babysitter had come to get me. She might have run away and never come back.
Both boys have both been really full of it for a week. (How do you get it not just around the edges at the legs, but all the way around the front of the diaper? Maybe he took off the cover and rubbed it around with his hands, then surreptitiously washed his hands. I wonder how he reached the faucet.) Sometimes Liam's taken a bath because we couldn't get it all gone otherwise. So when his godmother Kim asked about his cranky mood one evening -- "Is he pooping OK?" -- I said, If there's a correlation between poopiness and happiness, these boys would have reached higher levels of consciousness by now.
And since we're keeping the diaper pail outside in snowy conditions -- to keep the house from smelling toxic -- it's kind of interesting to take it inside, break up the frozen diapers, and put them in a hot-water rinse in the washing machine.
(Any prospective parents out there: cloth diapers really aren't a problem most of the time. And paper's been blowing out too. Maybe they'll start marketing: Disposable diapers with 1-cup volume control pocket! For babies who are absolutely full of it. And need 6 or more wipes per event. Wipes sold separately.)