BASIL: Words that summarise the first year in its entirety. I soon learned that if I threw out every item of my clothing that had been peed, shat or puked on I would be stark-bollock naked within two months. It was only in my first year of fatherhood that I truly understood what my sister-in-law meant by a "poo-tastrophe'.
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| How To Train Baby Potty |
You don't need me to tell you that babies piss, shit and vomit pretty much all of the time. Food enters via the mouth, but leaves by a variety of routes, none of them predictable. Some babies helpfully look ill just before they chuck up. Others seem to be smiling, and one or two might even chuckle. Again, this may be in your imagination, but one thing is for certain: in 30 seconds' time milky sick will be all over the place.
At the same moment, the infant bladder being tiny and hyperactive, the baby is almost certainly doing a pee, and may have a shit saved up, too. That nappy could be filling up faster than a Tokyo train in the rush hour. What to do? Where to start? Which cloth to use? What's on TV?
PISS
Funnily enough, this is not the worst of your problems. The extraordinary sponge-like qualities of modern-day nappies - you could pour most of a reservoir into one without unduly discomforting the wearer - mean that you don't actually have to change them every time baby does a pee. Indeed, you can often wait until the nappy is about the same weight as the baby itself. (If the baby is walking, this usefully develops the thigh muscles, although the noise of the piss-saturated nappy swishing along the ground may disturb passers-by.)
The big question, of course, is whether to go for disposables, and thus doom the planet, or selflessly use 'terry' nappies, and thus doom yourself and your partner to endless domestic drudgery. For the ecologically minded and rich who live in big cities, there are services that turn up every day to take away dirty 'terry' nappies and bring back nice clean ones. I know people who have looked into this and talked about it very enthusiastically, before buying disposables like everybody else. And if our great-great-great-great-
In early infancy, then, piss is a breeze - it doesn't even smell of anything much when you do come into contact with it. You are more likely to come into contact with it if you have a small boy, whose pee generally travels in a pleasing parabolic arc defined in Cartesian terms by the equation y2=4ax. With a newborn boy the most dangerous moment is when you take off his nappy. The sudden change of temperature activates the bladder, and if you are not ready with a muslin or something to staunch the flow, you will be changing your shirt in three or four minutes' time. Splashes in the eye are not uncommon. One mother I know got a squirt right up her nose.
It's when your baby hits the age of two, and starts potty-training, that urine will really make an impact on your life. On your life, on your carpet, on most pieces of furniture, and on your trousers if the baby is sitting on your lap at the time. Baby wants to pee in the potty. Really wants to. But baby keeps forgetting to ask. And you keep forgetting to ask baby. Then, during the commercial break, the tell-tale trickle down the tiny trousers, necessitating a complete change of clothes and a sizable wodge of kitchen roll to mop up the excess. It's even worse when it happens out of doors. Then the phrase 'piss is a breeze' assumes a whole new meaning. To find out more, you can check out How To Train Baby Potty.