First Diaper Disaster

When I was pregnant with my son, my fiance and I thought we were prepared for everything. I had worked in a daycare for four years and had a babysitting job with a family with an infant when I was a teenager. I had changed the diaper of a baby before and thought doing so with my own child would be easy as pie. I was not prepared for the fact that my newborn would be a lot tinier than the six-week old children in the daycare and that a baby's poop in his first few weeks of life is very different from any I had been used to changing.

Babies poop meconium for a few days after they are born. It is thick, dark, sticky and extremely messy. I had never seen meconium before and was very surprised when I opened my son's diaper in my hospital room and saw what was inside. Though I knew cleaning my son's bottom would not be my favorite thing to do, I thought I had it under control. I reached into the hospital bassinet for some baby wipes and realized there were none. Instead there were dry gauze squares that would be ineffective against the mess I was facing. I had my fiance wet these pieces of gauze so that I could cleanse the bottom of my baby boy.

I was nervous as I lifted his tiny legs because he seemed so fragile to me. I was half afraid if I lifted the wrong way or wiped too hard I would break him. This is part of what led to the next messy chain of events. I was uneasy as I tried to clean the poop off of my newborn's behind and just as I had gotten part of the meconium off of him he started to go again. There was a lot of the tarry poop coming out of him and rather than waiting for him to finish we tried to keep up with it as it came out. My fiance was helping to wipe him at this point. Though I was never quite certain how it happened we ended up having a poopy mess not only on the baby but also all over us, inside the bassinet and even on the wall next to us.

Exhausted from just giving birth and with my hormones all over the place I began to cry. We ended up calling a nurse in the nursery to come down and help us clean up our baby and the mess we made. She laughed when she walked in the room and told us she has at least one mess a day like this a week, especially when mom and dad are first time parents. This made me feel better as I was starting to wonder if I was going to be a horrible mother because I was having a hard time changing my baby's diaper.

When I remember this experience I cannot help but laugh. It was horrible at the time but an unbiased observer watching us would have thought we were hilarious as we tried to change that diaper. I have since changed many more of my son's diapers as well as those of his sister who was born a couple of months ago. I can honestly say I have never made that much of a mess again, though I have been peed on a couple of times.