Stupid Parent Tricks

Who's got a ridiculously embarrassing story about parenthood?

I'll start:

Before we brought my daughter, Peach (names changed to protect the innocent) home from the hospital 4 years ago, the nurse helped us get her dressed. She put a cute little onsie on her, then a little sleeper because it was cold out (February), and we packed her up in the shiny new car seat and took her home.

A few hours later, she woke up in the car seat (where we'd left her, because Lord knew we weren't going to risk taking her out of it) and we realized it was time to change her diaper. Like she was a ticking time bomb, we carefully carried her into her just completed nursery, complete with pink walls, designer bedding and state of the art video monitor, and gently laid her down on the never before used changing table.

Opening one snap at a time, we gingerly removed the sleeper to find the onsie. With the utmost care and constant soothing cooing, reminding Peach that she was wonderful, I opened the onsie and then the diaper.

She had pooped.

That's when all hell broke loose.

Somewhere between the confusion of getting the wipes open, tearing the box of diapers to shreds, and making sure we didn't disturb the umbilical cord, she'd managed to kick around enough to get poop on the bottom of the onsie.

The challenges at hand: How do you 1. get a onsie over the head of a newborn baby without breaking her neck, 2. get a poop covered onsie over the head of a baby without breaking her neck or dragging poop all the way up her back and into her hair?

Clearly there was only one solution to this problem. "We're cutting it off her," I said, taking parental control of the situation.

"Yeah, good," my husband, who I'll call Babe, responded, running to fetch the orange Fiskars from the kitchen.

He returned and handed them to me to perform the operation. Peach, in the meantime, looked at me with a clear expression of disappointment. Babe held her legs apart while I carefully cut straight up the middle of the once adorable little article of clothing, completely forgetting that the scissors were about as large as her torso and rapidly approaching the bottom of her chin.

"Wait!" Babe shrieked, slapping his hand over her chin before I stabbed my three day old child with the point of the scissors. The motion startled her, which made her kick more, which resulted in poop on the bottom of both of her feet which she was now smearing across the changing pad. The diaper itself wiggled free and landed face down on the brand new carpet and the dog, who'd been in the corner of the room whining for the last five minutes, walked over and started sniffing it.

I instinctively kicked the diaper away from my dog, getting poop on my sock and was now trying to balance on one foot while continuing to cut the onsie off of the poor innocent child who was now staring at me in complete disbelief of my lack of competence.

Twenty minutes later: the changing pad was now soaked from the sponge bath we tried to give Peach (using 4 washcloths and two bath towels). In the garbage were the changing pad cover, one pair of socks, two receiving blankets, the offending onsie that started all of this, my husband's shirt, and the three diapers we'd ruined trying to contain the situation.

The punchline: two days ago the same thing happened with my 4 week old son. The casualties this time were limited to one changing pad, a sleeper, and two diapers.