Sunday, April 8, 2012

the First of Three.



The first of the three sets of grandparents have come and gone.  Alice loved having Grandma Julie and Zayde Aharon here to help take care of her.  And, frankly... so did her mom.  It was so nice to have an extra set of hands to hold Alice while I showered.  Or while I napped.  Or while I ate my breakfast/lunch/dinner.  We will definitely miss having them here.

So today we all took a walk around a lake near our apartment.  It wasn't especially warm out (about 48F) so we bundled Alice up and loaded her into the stroller.  As we were walking out the door I realized I didn't bring anything to change her diaper should she need it but I thought Hey, we won't be gone that long and off we went.  Big mistake.  About halfway into our walk, Alice started to wail.  We had gotten to the point in our walk were I could take a shortcut and head home, so I did while the rest of the group headed on to finish the walk around the lake.  After Alice spit her pacifier out for the twentieth time, I realized that we weren't going to make it home without some sort of immediate intervention and frankly, my heart was breaking hearing her cry so maybe the intervention was more for my sanity than for hers.  So I sat down on a park bench, stripped off my shirt enough to allow Alice to eat and grabbed her flailing body out of the stroller.  And she was soaking wet.  Like through the diaper, through her pants and through her blanket soaking wet.  Okay.  Obviously the quick breast feeding alone was not going to stop her crying.  As I sat there feeding her, our apartment seemed ridiculously far away and I couldn't imagine how I was going to get home quickly enough to get her properly changed and fed.  So I finished up the quick feeding, plugged the pacifier back into her mouth and put her in the stroller.  And she immediately started to wail.  Like uncontrollably.  Like I have never heard her cry like that before.  And it totally broke my heart!!  So I grabbed her out, wrapped her tightly in the extra blanket I brought and carried her with one arm while I pushed the stroller with the other.  Luckily this worked and she fell asleep in my arms as I walked.  And by the time I got home, both of my arms were dead asleep from carrying her but it was worth it as she didn't make another peep the rest of the way.

I guess I need to be a little more prepared next time.  But hey, now breast feeding in public seems like no big deal!

Please tell me you've done something silly like this before and not taken an important thing that your kid ended up needing like a goddamn diaper?!  Seems pretty basic.  Have baby.  Take diaper.  Duh.  Both Lee and I felt horrible having put her through that.  Lesson learned!

4 comments:

  1. yep, we've totally done this. And it doesn't seem to get better as the weeks go on, there'll still be days when you forget stuff. Friday afternoon Lulu & I went to watch Nick at the mountain bike downhill comp. It was about 10mins out of town on a dirt road that my car was not four-wheel drive enough to drive along so we had to get a lift in to where the event was. About 20 mins after we got there Lulu started screaming. She was all wet, through her clothes (how do they know to do this when we're out?)

    She was still crying after the change so, I went to mix some formula & realised I hadn't packed any teets for the bottles. So frustrating having enough formula, bottles, water but no teets. So I tried to breastfeed her, which she had done happily earlier that morning. Nope didn't want to this time, not to mention that she rarely breastfeeds at home, let alone in public, but you're right, when they're screaming you'll try anything. I ended up cup feeding her the formula, which she took ok. It was pretty messy, she still wasn't settled and we ended up leaving not long after that. As soon as we were in the car heading home she fell asleep. My friend, who I was with, ended up coming back to my house & cleaning my kitchen while I bathed & fed Lulu, then poured me the biggest glass of gin & tonic. Good friends are gold.

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  2. Oh yes, been there, done that. And I got worse as my son got older- I'd think I saw a pattern or a schedule and would venture out without a bottle, nursing bra, diaper, blankie, you-name-it, only to be proven wrong at the worst possible moment. The heartbreaking guilty feeling never really goes away, but you do learn to laugh at yourself through it. Promise.

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  3. Forgetting a diaper is like some sort of new mom initiation thing I'm sure :)

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  4. Oh yes, I remember a first outing with you as an infant. We were going to visit your daddy at his office. Got you all dressed up, me dressed up and ??? diaper explosion! Had to change us both. After that, we added extra time to get to our destinations, extra diapers and an extra outfit ... just in case.

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