sick family thanksgiving / what's worse than diapers?

Aha... yes, as the title of this post implies, the whole family was sick for Thanksgiving. I had a week off, and to celebrate, I got sick on the afternoon of the Friday of my last day at work, and didn't completely get better until... um... today. Yep, so I spent all nine days off being sick. Cool!

Aria & Hosanna thought my being sick looked so awesome & fun that they decided to join up on Wednesday too. So, on Thanksgiving day, instead of travelling to San Jose to be with my family, we ended up staying home by ourselves. Hosanna had made a big pot pie we were going to share with ten people, and that was pretty much all the food we had in the house since we had thought we'd be out of town for a few days and all the grocery stores were closed. So we sat around being sick and eating pot pie. Hopefully, I won't associate pot pie with being sick for the rest of my life.

I had a lot of time to reflect during the week at home. One thing I was thinking about is how people who don't have kids tend to use diapers as the example of why they don't want kids / don't have them yet / don't want anything to do with kids. Now I'll freely admit that before we had Aria, I felt exactly the same way. I didn't change a single diaper before I had a baby of my own, because, well, YUCK, why would I want to do that? It's YOUR kid, YOU change it.

So here I am now, and I have changed Aria hundreds of times, and because she is my daughter, it is no big deal at all. So I have to laugh when someone at work says "Oh no, I don't want kids yet. I'm not ready for diapers." Because really, diapers are one of the least stressful, least difficult things for me about being a parent. Yes, they're messy. Yes, they can smell really, really bad. But they are a known problem with a very simple and known solution, one that takes as little as one minute to resolve.

So for anyone who is interested, here's my list of five things that, to me, are much more daunting parental tasks than changing diapers:

1. Trimming fingernails. Nowhere in any parenting book that I read did it warn you that infants have razor-sharp claws and are entirely capable of scratching your eyes out without warning. But just try and trim those things. First, they are microscopic. Second, she's squirming around like crazy. Third, you *will* screw up and draw blood, which the baby will most likely not even feel, but will cause you to panic for an hour and spend the rest of the day feeling like pond scum. And unlike many things, this job only gets harder as they get older. I dare you to try to trim the fingernails of an aware two-year old. Ha! Good Fucking Luck.

2. Figuring out what the hell is wrong now (AKA soothing the unsoothable cry). Sooner or later, your child will scream for a long, long time, and you will have no fucking clue what is wrong. And it will mess with your head BIG TIME. Once, when she was about 18 months, Aria screamed bloody murder at me for a half hour when I got her out of her crib after a nap. I tried everything I could think of to try and figure it out, and absolutely nothing worked. Finally, by complete chance, I happened upon the stuffed animal (or whatever it was) that she had wanted all along, and she just stopped crying instantaneously. Half an hour is a long, long time for that. (And yes, we are blessedly lucky that with Aria's even temperament these sort of episodes are relatively rare.) Still, I could have changed a poopy diaper fifteen times in that period, and would gladly have done so to avoid the stress and feeling of total incompetence that the inability to soothe her brought on.

3. Bedtime. I've written elsewhere about bedtime challenges. Suffice to say, it's a moving target, and although it can be a wonderful experience of closeness with your child, it can also be a complete nightmare that makes the worst poopy diaper seem like a walk in the park.

4. Changing the crib sheet. This one is so innocuous, I feel silly even admitting it. But I truly hate this job. The crib is so full of weird bedding (bumpers? dust ruffles?), and everything is so freaking small. Nothing in the world makes me feel more like a ham-fisted oaf than trying to fit my sausage fingers in through those tiny little slats to pull a sheet off the tiny mattress. And it's at a weird height so it tweaks my back every time I do it. Sure, you can shortcut the affair by taking the mattress out of the crib altogether (as my lovely wife pointed out to me recently), but you're still going to have to tie up all those bumpers when you're done. Blech. This is one chore that I would gladly trade a whole day of diaper changing to get out of.

5. Cleaning up my potty mouth. The horror of trying to undo twenty years of this bad habit is daunting indeed. Once, before Aria was born, I went to visit my sister & her two kids for a few hours. As I drove home, I leaned out the window and screamed obsceneties out the window for a couple minutes, just to have the release from trying to hold my tongue. And now here I am, I can't say any of that "stuff" in my house EVER AGAIN. And I have to ask my friends not to, either. It's hard! We are all uncouth heathen with terrible minds, and we cannot be trained! Give me your worst diaper, just let me be free to say Fuck again! Argh!

(That's all I could think of for now, but I'm sure there are others. Parents: feel free to submit your worse-than-diapers lists in the comments!)