Keep the Change
For reasons beyond my understanding, my sister recently entrusted me with supervising my 22-month-old nephew. Well, kind of—he was already in bed for the night, so I was merely an adult presence while she and my brother-in-law spent an evening out. Seemed like something I was incapable of screwing up.
“Odds are, he’ll sleep the whole time,” she explained on her way out the door. “But if he does stand up in his crib and start screaming, don’t freak out. He’s actually still asleep when he does that.”
Nephew’s haunted, got it.
“Oh, and sometimes he has diarrhea in his sleep, so if he needs to be cleaned up, the changing table is here and the diaper stuff is …”
OK, hold up.
My sister’s voice morphs into the murmur of a Charlie Brown parent as I process this new and terrible revelation: This woman thinks I know how to change a diaper. And it is WAY too late to tell her she’s wrong.
See, I never spent much time around babies. Know why? Because I am baby. I’m the baby of the family, the baby of my friends, the baby in my office, the baby of my house wherein I am the sole resident. There is no room in this crib for an actual baby, the kind that cries and drools and hogs the TV to watch Cocomelon for 700 hours and doesn’t pitch in on the rent.
Before my nephew came along, I had never held a baby, never cared for a baby, and most certainly never changed a baby. Where do you even begin? How do I hold him down? Why is there a powder and a cream? What if he pees on me?
But none of that mattered now. His parents had already left, and that left me with a dilemma: to change or not to change?
On the one hand, I was not about to have my first Pampers primer be with a baby who 1) is haunted, 2) doesn’t realize he’s unloaded on himself, and 3) doesn’t even know I’m there! The kid sees me maybe once a month. Imagine waking up from a nightmare crying for mommy, but instead there’s just me, and I’m also crying. That’d be awful for everyone.
On the other hand, it’s not my nephew’s fault he’s a gross drippy baby whose aunt has a low tolerance for gross drippy things. He doesn’t deserve to deal with a wet diaper when there is a (probably)
perfectly capable grown-up there to care for him. So, I swallowed my dread and popped open diaper- changing tutorials on my phone—three different ones, so I could be prepared for absolutely anything that happened.
Anyway, nothing happened. He slept the whole time, as predicted, my sister was grateful, and I continue to live blissfully diaper-free.
Anticlimactic, I know. But some things are better left unchanged.
