We are going to talk about poop. When you have a child for awhile your entire world becomes an exercise of food going in and poop and other waste coming out. I couldn't possibly count the number of times that I have had some sort of bodily fluid violently projected onto me from one end or the other. I went into this knowing that I was going to have to change diapers and I can tell you that I am the diaper changing master at this point. Lets just say that each kid went through six diapers a day. That is 540 diapers a month and 6,480 a year. My kids were in diapers till about three and a half, with some diapers here and there, but just thinking three and a half years that's 29,160 diapers.
During the diaper ages people would always ask me how are you doing it? Cloth or disposable? This is a hotly debated topic among the young parent community. With strong proponents on both sides. Rather than rehash all the arguments that I got into for using disposable, and I promise you there was a few. The simple fact of it was a cost and time issue. The water waste and cost of constantly running a washing and drying machine for three years was more costly then working with disposable in time and money. When you have babies you are or should become its' slave. The only real control you have over that baby is deciding want over need. You want to sleep but you need to feed the baby. You want to use the bathroom you need to stop that baby from wiping crap on your couch.
For the first couple of years need will consume your life and want will be a dream. You may not know it but, when a child goes potty by themselves for the first time, it's like the angels themselves came and lifted a burden from your shoulders. You must never take that for granted. To this day I keep a little training potty in the car incase of the randomness of life, and a couple of time I have had to stop for the kids to go to the bathroom in the car. Which is awful when one has a barnburner in a car it can really be a rough experience for everyone. Also before the kids I was not very careful about diet. Know I know that what goes in is what comes out or doesn't come out as the case may be. All it takes is one painful poop for a baby for them to just not want to poop. I really don't know how this mewling little person has the ability to decide not to poop but somehow some manage to do so. Requires doctor visits and stool softeners and fiber and fruit but not to much fruit or that's a whole other problem. But as any thing with experience it just becomes another thing you manage with out having to think about. It gets better. Since I have boys there is the fountain effect, There is the off chance that when you have boys and you go to change their diaper that once the cold air hits their junk that a stream of golden piss will hit you squarely on your nicest clothes or your hair or even worse places. This never happened to me. I saw it happen to family members and my wife once but never to me. Just luck I guess but it does happen it's not just a parenting cliché. Not so much with the girl, although she has puked on me the most and she is the one that has the most "I pooped in the bath" points out of the three kiddos. As cute as kids are there sure is a lot of technical work in the back end.
Robert, you make me so glad to have married into parenthood and thus bypassed this aspect of child rearing! Mind you, with your triplets, every experience is to the power of three, and the intensity of that has got to be insane. I imagine there are lessons that you have and will learn from your trio that other parents miss completely, just because of that triple intensity. My son is twelve, going on eighteen, and his dark side is truly dark - the beginnings of brooding depression, the reality of middle school bullying, and a premature desperation for acceptance by the opposite gender. It keeps me up at night wondering how best to help him with these problems, how best to condense my advice into short nuggets that he will get, remember, and be able to use in a pinch. I see his depression stemming from perfectionism and a need to please coupled with mediocre performance at school. So I work on teaching him how to study better, how to get more for his time, how to make academics easier for him personally. I try to make him understand that his best is always good enough for me, and to hell with what anyone else says! I've trained him in boxing and both korean and chinese martial arts for three years now. The bullying problem is mostly emotional damage at this point. The couple of times his antagonists have taken it physical, they've learned quickly that he will have none of that. So there is some success there, I suppose, but the damage they do to him up to that point! The name calling and teasing, their ability to make him feel like a total social outcast! I don't know how to counter that, or how to mend the damage already done. I try to tell him to use his wit to turn it about on them, but he, in the moment of being tormented, loses his wit, his confidence, and a host of other things too. Finally, there's the girl problems... he is pre-sexual, though I doubt that will remain the case much longer. Still, he is obsessed with having a girl friend. None of his friends have girlfriends! But to my son, he is somehow unsuccessful in his own estimation without the approval of a girl. I think this comes from his father, I know it does because he is the same way! I just don't know how it passed on, or how to counter it. Le sigh. I never meant to write so much. I hope I can give my boy all the things that he needs, but I fear that I came along too late for so much of it. Make sure that you do better than my son's yahoo Dad did in these early years, Robert, or you will have these problems I describe to the power of three, and then you'll be begging to go back to talking about poop!
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