How Do You Not-Diaper a Baby?

The picture above shows our method in dealing with bare-butted Micah this week. As you learned from our anniversary blog, we were not allowed to use a diaper on the little stinker for a whole week following the circumcision procedure. Why? Well, first of all, there was a plastic stick about an inch and a half long that was sticking straight off the end of his…his…well, the surgery site. We’re sure that it acted as a protector as it healed but why did it have to stick out so far? The jury is still out. Maybe it’s just to annoy little boys so as to make them tougher later in life.

 

So yea, 7 days were prescribed in which “pamper ataderegum” (Eng: Pampers do not do/make!) That’s right, diapers are called “pampers” here – that’s a clear sign that they were brought into the country from outside, not native to Ethiopia. In language school, where teachers try their best to steer away from these obvious borrowed words, we were taught the word “shint cherk” which literally means “urine cloth.” However, the laughter of real-world people upon usage is a clear sign that such expressions are really not in common use. Imagine walking into Wal-Mart, “yea…uh…could you direct me to the aisle with the urine cloths?” (please note that the word urine is a nice, technical term that I chose for the blog translation…substitute your own everyday word for such a liquid and then go ask your Wal-Mart greeter! Yea, that’s us over here, minus the superstore.)

 

So anyway, how do you not diaper a baby? Well, we started with a cloth diaper held up against the backside and a large spit-up rag loosely placed between the legs. Then we tried to keep him tightly wrapped in a blanket to limit the movement, for nothing gave him more pleasure than to kick those things out of place. Then we would wait and pray – hoping that the cloths were in the right place when they needed to be. Overall, I’d say we did pretty well on the backside, although our shirts and pants ended up catching much of the frontal emissions.

 

Having extra focus on this not-so-glamorous side of Micah’s life did teach us one very important thing about our little guy: feeding time is most often bathroom time. I guess input requires immediate output. So, to compensate for this down the road, we will probably have to install a working toilet as Micah’s seat at the dinner table. We can only hope he grows out of it, otherwise are we obligated as concerned parents to warn every nice young lady he will one day take out on a date?