Didn’t We JUST Wash That?
Another day, another blowout. Good lord. To channel our inner Joey Tribiani imitating Chandler Bing, could we BE washing any more clothes? The curse of the liquid diet of breastfeeding and formula supplementing is a relatively 100 percent liquid diaper. Liquid flows, right to the edge of the diaper, creeps up over the edge, and travels out to the clothes, tainting everything that surround it. One diaper blowout can result in, at minimum, three things needing to be washed: the clothes, the blanket surrounding the child, and the diaper-changing pad that you have to put your shitty baby on. To be clear, our baby isn’t shitty, but how else do you refer to a shit-covered baby?
The thing about additional laundry loads when having a baby is not about the crazy volume of clothes that a baby goes through. It’s more a reflection of not being able to leave the clothes sitting in whatever nasty fluid just came out of that tiny human for a long period of time. Burp cloths, sheets, the cover of the Dock-a-Tot, pajamas, the swaddle; they all seem to constantly be covered in spit-up. Blankets, swing covers, bouncer protectors, car seats, onesies; all prime candidates for blowouts. Even an almost-blowout can become a laundry situation when, in the middle of a diaper change, your child becomes affected by a case of the jimmy legs and flaps those feet through her excrement like she is auditioning to be in Lord of the Dance. All these things have to go straight into the washing machine, or at least the laundry room, to be treated and quarantined to prevent them smelling up a whole wing of the house. These first few weeks we have done, at minimum, one load of clothes a day.
Here is how one recent blowout ran through four outfits. First, the blowout. I will spare you the details of the consistency and scope but suffice it to say it went up the back not quite to her neck rolls. There goes one outfit. During the diaper change and mitigation of contamination, she pees on her new clean outfit before the diaper gets secured. Outfit two status: soiled. Clean that up, wipe her down again, get the next diaper on and another outfit, and as we are picking her up, she spits up down the front of her clothes. Third outfit down for the count and we transition to number four which only stays on long enough for us to get her to her much-needed bath time. Curse words were said.
Lastly, why do companies even make baby clothes in white and light colors? By the end of our first two weeks home from the hospital, seemingly every light piece of fabric we put around that baby resulted in a milky stain around the neck or chest, a yellow residue around the booty, or a reddish brown spot from the belly-button scab falling off. Consider this my petition to the fashion industry. All baby clothes should henceforth be made in all black, looking like you raided the closet of David from Schitt’s Creek, because if not, after a few days all of your baby clothes will look like they have been in a literal shit creek.