What No One Told Me About Changing the First Diaper or How I Found Myself Up Shit Creek

By Richie Duchon

Twyla

People love to talk about the body of parenting work that is diaper changing.

They talk disposal systems and smell mitigation. They say, “You HAVE to get the Diaper Genie. It’s the best.” They ask moms the tired question about dad: “Is HE changing his share of diapers?” And the subject of diapering almost always lands at some point on the phenomenon parents call “poop up the back,” which is exactly what it sounds like.


To be fair, with eight to 10 changes a day, it’s a huge part of a new parent’s life. Plus, the size, color, and consistency of what’s inside can be an important indicator of a baby’s health, so the subject begs a lot of attention.

Before Twyla arrived, we decided to use a hybrid regime of cloth diapers during the day and disposables at night. We carefully engineered what containers to put dirty diapers in and their location and proximity to the changing area. We gussied her changing area with adorable painted baskets and containers for cremes, q-tips, diapers, wipes, etc. Suffice it to say, we were prepared for the Battle Royal of diapering...at home.

What no one told me in advance was that diapering 10 times out of 10 starts at the hospital (if you have a baby at the hospital), where we did not carefully engineer a system and location for all the relevant pieces and parts of diapering. Sure, we packed a bag with the necessary tools to change a diaper, but the focus of the packing was squarely on the couple super cute outfits she might wear home from the hospital.

Additionally, for reasons boring and not, we came to the hospital on a Tuesday night and my wife gave birth by C-section on a Friday morning. After some 60 hours at the hospital with about eight total hours of sleep and one move from a Labor and Delivery room to a Post Partem room, bags were scattered and wipes to clean a dirty tuchus were nowhere to be found at the big moment.

Worth noting, is that a newborn’s first poop is usually pretty large. She’s been storing it for weeks in advance of arriving. Twyla was two weeks late, so it was extra large. The following video is a classic and hilarious tableaux of a dad failing miserably at one of his first acts of parenting:

In case you missed that last bit at the end, it was my wife and I, in chorus, giving the nurse a hearty “yes” to her asking if we needed help.

The idea of having just met the daughter that we wondered about for nearly 10 months prior, plus the exhaustion from days of labor completely obscured the reality of actually caring for our newborn.

Guess I should have known that parenting, even in the first few hours of life, involved more than staring at my likeness like a complete stoner.

Read Richie's previous tales of parenting in Burp!