It’s my sister’s birthday! And she will be spending it locked up in an apartment with her 11 month old baby, as she has spent every day for the past 4 months. I tried to think of what would be the most wonderful thing I could give someone in that situation, and I decided Moral Support and a Sense of Not Being Alone would be the best gift. But you have to help me “make” it! As a gift to me, give a gift to her 🙂
Let’s give my sister a little virtual coffee break today! Share your baby stories and advice, listen to her stories, just generally pretend we are all having coffee after a Mommy and Me class in stained shabby clothes with big circles under our eyes, but still so happy to be with people who know what it is like.
I’ll start! With one of those vital important topics that no one ever wants to talk about but parents of babies really really care about. What was your diaper system? Did you do disposable, or a service, or somewhere in between? Was your baby so messy that you had to put a rubber sheet over the mattress in case of leaks or is that just my nephew?
dontcallitbollywood 
Happy birthday, Sister! I don’t have a baby so I have no advice or know anything about which diapers to use but I’ll share my funny stories about diapers.
I was 22 when a close friend had a baby. This was my very first close contact with a baby since I was one. I helped changed the baby’s diaper since he was born. However, one time I was alone with him at a store and had to change his diaper in a very small space, and distinctly remember almost passing out from the smell. Apparently, my friend has introduced him to solid foods and never warned me of its effects on poop smell!!! Bad bad friend!
Also, related to solid foods and poop – did your baby ever have technicolor poops? I used to find the baby’s technicolor poops hilarious (I was 22 and poop jokes were funny). I remember thinking oh he ate peas and carrots, I wonder if his poop with be green and orange, and lo and behold it was!
That’s all I have for baby stories. But I hope you have a wonderful day.
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These are great baby stories!
My nephew apparently is enjoying beets quite a bit at the moment, which leads to extremely alarming poops that look like his insides are bleeding, and also stain things quite a bit. But hey, vitamins!
On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 8:59 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Why is no one commenting? Who would not want to share baby stories??? Okay, I’ll start things off. I don’t have a baby but I was a baby and for my first birthday, we had a balloon party. I wasn’t allowed to touch them or play with them myself, but I really loved balloons, so my Mom and Grandma blew up a whole bunch of them and let me watch them.
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I have the complete opposite story about balloons. Someone thought it would be a great idea to have balloons at a kid’s birthday party. Fool! Well balloons pop, little me got terrified of the noise and till this day, I hate/am terrified of balloons – or any other popping noise for that matter!
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Poor you! My only balloon tragedy was years later, when I was handed a helium balloon and of course let go of it and lost it.
On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 9:16 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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My oldest was terrified of balls for the first two years of his life. TERRIFIED. He would see a ball and cry, or crawl away and cry, or or run away and cry. And he was a boy, so of course for Christmas and birthdays everyone gave him… balls. We hypothesize it was due to a balloon, but we don’t really know why. He is an avid soccer player now.
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Happy Birthday to your Sis!!!
Well, tbh I haven’t been around babies that much…but I can remember how much work my baby brother was as a baby. He’s ten years younger than me, so I had nanny duties when my parents were busy sometimes in the afternoon. I remember how much he liked to play peekaboo with my hair!!!! Tbh it was sometimes painful, cause he tried to use my hair as a curtain, but he had so much fun doing that.
My mother tells me that my niece, loved doing that too. Sadly I still haven’t been able to meet her yet, since I haven’t been able to fly back home in the last years…maybe next year. This year, the pandemic made that impossible.
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We used disposable diapers with my son. And yes we had to use a rubber sheet on the mattress for a few poopsplosions. We also had an epic night when he vomited all over the wall and crib and then went back to sleep. We found him in the morning perfectly cheerful but absolutely caked in vomit up to his eyebrows. The acid damaged the paint on the walls. Good times! 😩
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Crib vomit episodes rate high on the disgusting meter. I remember one of those that woke me up at 2:00 in the morning, carefully cleaned off and changed the baby, stripped the crib bedding, and scrubbed the vomit off the wall and from between all the crib slats at 2:00 in the morning, put fresh sheets on, and put the baby back to bed, only to have him throw up again. By dawn I remember we had both gone through two sets of pajamas, I was in a bathrobe, he was wrapped in a blanket, and we were crashed out on a comforter on the floor.
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Happy birthday, Sister!!! 😀
I don’t have any baby stories or anything like it. But we have this Baby Box or Maternity Package here in Finland that is for ALL mothers and is provided by the government for free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_package
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22751415
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Happy birthday, sister.
Our diapers are plastic too. Somehow that seems a much bigger deal now that our big boy is two and needs much bigger diapers. During his first few month, we actually sometimes managed to keep his diapers clean. When changing, we would hold him over a big bowl and he would pee or poop into that. But then he didn’t want to be held anymore but wasn’t ready for potty training. So now we’re still waiting.
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Happy Birthday Sister! I have a gazillion baby stories, but they aren’t always funny, or sweet. I cloth diapered for all my kids, though gave up when #3 was 10 months old because the HE washing machine at the house we moved into never got them clean enough once he was consuming more than breastmilk. My first son had a ton of rashes and allergic reactions to … who knows what, the doctors never figured it out, but I guess he outgrew them because now he can eat anything. He’s 11. But because of the rashes I can discuss pocket diapers, vs cloth, whisper pull ups, wool covers, fleece covers, and diaper folds and fasteners. I have SO MUCH KNOWLEDGE about diapers. Poop, I’ve examined a lot of poop- remember that the child ate beets or blueberries so you don’t freak out. I even had my favorite kinds of poop that were easier to clean. SO MUCH POOP. I tried to potty train the oldest by letting him go diaperless around 20 months, and it kinda worked, in that it worked for pee, but I had to clean a lot of poop off the floor, and the shack we lived in had carpet in every room except the kitchen. He didn’t potty train until 3. I didn’t even try any earlier with the second. And the third was blessed and potty trained himself at 2 and a half.
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Yes, cloth diapered both of mine too. I tried a bunch and ended up liking old school cotton best. With the second, I gave up on cloth at nighttime when he was about a year and went to pull-ups because it was easier. Probably not related, but that was the kid who didn’t fully nighttime potty train until he was like four. And yes, they will have waterproof mattress covers until they move out for college as far as I’m concerned.
It hadn’t occurred to me until now, but quarantine is perfect for potty training, since you can’t go many places anyway until they can be trusted to hold it. Not suggesting for Sister, since 11 months is way young, but it would be good letting the kid run around pantsless time. Who’s going to see them anyway?
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Tell me more about this HE washer thing! That’s what we have and I am always second guessing how clean the diapers are.
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When I had a top loading regular washing machine I did two washes for the diapers, first a wash without soap, then a wash with soap and an extra rinse. And that house had a yard with space for a line, so the sun would get out any stains. And every 3-6 months I would wash the diapers with dawn or something for a bigger clean / stripping. At the new house I tried to follow the same routine, but once my child was on solid foods I couldn’t get the stink out with three washes, or even four sometimes. And I never really worked out the stripping/dawn routine. If I had bought a sprayer, that attached to the toilet, to spray off the diapers first, it might have been fine. And it probably would have cost less than the disposables I ended up buying. But my husband wanted to switch to disposables, and this was my last child, so I gave up. I used read a diaper forum, and I bet they have multiple threads about washing with an HE machine. I’ll see if I can find one for you.
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https://www.mothering.com/forum/221-diapering/1346952-wash-routine-he-washers.html. – It was slower to load and full of more advertisements than I remember, but this site has more information than you’ll ever need.
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What a nice idea as a wish to share baby stories 🙂
So, happy birthday to you, dear Margaret’s sister 🙂
It very rarely bothered me to change the kids diapers, to clean them and then to play with them riding a bicycle, making a train journey, hearing a bike pass, starting a car…by always doing the bicycle movement with the chubby (then less & les chubby) legs accelerating the speed and doing the fitting sounds. Or I did fart-sounds with my mouth on the soles or made fingerplays.
Now, as they have grown out of diapers, I still play with them…but the only of those plays that has survived the diaper-changing time are the farting sounds made with the mouth on a body part (mostly arm)…
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Oh, a wool cover over a disposable will help prevent nighttime leaks.
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This is such a great present! Thanks everyone! The other major topic at our house these days is naps since he is mysteriously changing his schedule for no reason. Any ideas?
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Happy Birthday!
Maybe the quarantine makes him change his schedule? In the first months he slept because he was used to but now “realized” he doesn’t feel sleepy at the same hours? Does it have any sense?
One of the toughtes times for me as a mom was when my son suddenly decided he doesn’t need afternoon naps anymore. I don’t remember how old he was, but definitely older than your son. I needed my nap and free time so badly and tried and tried but he grow out of those naps and what could I do? I surrender.
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I remember changing nap schedule a few times. The only reason tended to be ‘grown some more’.
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They just do that sometimes. I remember it sometimes coinciding with teething or that wired phase they go through with a cognitive leap, but other times it just felt like they were messing with us. With kid one, I fought a lot to train (and retrain and retrain) him into a nap schedule. With kid two I didn’t have energy for that and just rolled with it. They turned out the same in terms of sleep so not sure if one is better than the other. It must be twice as inconvenient if you’re trying to juggle kid care and work though!
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Happy Birthday, Sister!
The only poop/diaper story I have is from long ago. I was working in a hospital as a candy stripper and was assigned to the children’s ward. The lovely nurses there saw their opportunity and, instead of having me entertain the kiddies, had me washing out diapers. Loads and loads of diapers. Hold onto one end, flick them in a toilet, flush and hoist the diaper up and down. Repeat. And repeat. I was not a candy stripper for long.
One baby story actually belongs to my father. When he was born, he had a shock of bright red hair. He also had a severe case of jaundice. With his electric red hair and brilliant yellow skin he was a sight. Though no one got to see him. My grandmother kept him in the nursery, away from all visitors, until the jaundice dissipated. (His older sisters always claimed that he was kept in the attic because he was really a demon baby. Big sisters can be a lot of fun.)
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My nephew had jaundice! But a really light case, no exciting skon colors that i could see.
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We used cloth diapers during day time and disposable during night time for my daughter. Fortunately by her second month her potty timing got fixed. Only once a day, in the morning while I sit down for my breakfast!!
When she was 3 weeks old, I went to supermarket to buy a new brand of diapers. Some guy, a new father, won’t let me buy it. He kept saying that his daughter was allergic to it. He even took them away from my trolley and put my usual brand in the trolley. I was annoyed but had no energy to fight with him so I bought the usual one. Six months later I tried the new brand again and it turns out that my daughter is allergic to it too!! Thanks to that random guy I was spared from dealing with rashes on 3 week old baby!!
My daughter loved her bathroom but she loved going to potty in open fields while traveling. As soon as we cross the city limits and see the open fields, she would make the sign for potty!! She would not use the rest areas or wear a diaper. It was a running joke in my family that now they understand why we moved back to India just before she was born.
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Eleven months is a nice age! They’re big and sturdy and have lots of personality, but still babies and often not walking yet? The first year birthday to me marks the point of getting through the most exhausting and physical part, but also the beginning of the year of never sitting down – that part starts as soon as they get really mobile, especially once they start walking, and lasts until they have enough judgement to follow basic rules and directions. It’s the part where you marvel that any of us survive to adulthood. And also some more complicated emotional stuff starting with separation anxiety around a year and a half. Eleven months is right before they start to get really “busy”, as one of our favorite ladies from daycare used to call it, escaping from every place and reaching higher than you realized they could and climbing things they shouldn’t be climbing and getting into things you never thought they would get into (like cat food, or toilet paper, or big Costco-sized bottles of olive oil). Which has its fun parts too! Just saying, enjoy the relatively calm moments when you get them, and roll with the rest, it’s an age when nothing lasts for very long.
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Oh and Happy Birthday! Hope you found a nice way to celebrate!
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