Our Life

Yea, for those of you that have kids, you are thinking “4 weeks and this is your first diaper change!?? Slacker!”

Those of you without kids, you may be thinking “EEEWWW!”

I held out as log as I could. Chris knew that going into us having childern, diapers and poop and vomiting would be major stress points for me. Most of the trepidation I had about infants are those events. When visiting anyone with a newborn, they would say to me  “Wanna hold her!?”, and you could see it in my face: panic. I would see the projectile milk-vomiting baby’s on America’s funniest videos. While others laughed, I would just look in horror. Poop? I didn’t want to think about it.

She has been very gracious by not FORCING me into changing Corinn. She has given gentile hints, but never made it an issue. I guess, hoping I would come around…

Last night, I was expressing my frustrations at being a father, to an other co-worker, James. I was expressing that I feel I don’t have anything to offer this newborn. I can’t feed her, as we are not bottle feeding expressed milk (yet). When mommy has calmed kiddo down, she wants me to hold her while calm so I can have some positive interaction with her. Seems every time I get her in my arms, it is full-tilt “10″ on the crying scale… This is really discouraging for me. “You were fine not 2 seconds ago! Why do you only cry in MY arms!??” I wanted the fun, giggling, adorable bonding moments you hear about. I felt like I was no good, nothing to offer.

“You’re right, but that’s not true… You can’t calm her like mommy can. If you guys are breast feeding, you don’t have that going for you. But, if you don’t DO anything with her, like just give her back to mommy when she start crying, she doen’t like you because you realy DON’T have anything to offer her.

It happened to me too. What I did, was I started changing my son’s diapers. He got used to “that other person can’t feed me, but he can change me…”  So I established myself on the “Good” list. The more things, even if they seem small to you, you get on that list, the better you are going to feel.”

So, this afternoon, after a “fart heard round the house”, I got mommy to supervise me changing a diaper. It’s exactly as you think it is. Messy… all over everything… smelly… I have been told that soon I will miss this type of smelly, as once they get on solid food, the smell progresses from what we have now, lets say a 2, to a 10. Whoo hoo!

Baby steps…