Thursday, March 24, 2011

The Big Blowout

Every once in a while, I think it will be a fun thing to have us share personal stories with one another--it helps us to remember that we are all just real moms out there, struggling and moving through humorous, trying, and tender moments on our own. Here's the topic for today:

What is your worst ever diaper blowout story?


I'll relay mine to you here in the posts and hope we get a ton of comments back. Let's face it--these tales were horrific at the time but are some of our funniest tales to recount now that they're in the distant past. Let's all have a good chuckle at the universality of this inevitably terrible baby moment ;)

I was home alone with Baby Aurelia, who was about three months old at the time, a preciously tender little bundle that I nearly had attached to me at all times. We were still nursing all the time as she was an exclusively breastfed baby, and we had not yet purchased any nice diapers but were using these homemade hand-me-down flannel fitteds that came from a friend of a friend of mine. Their leg elastics pretty much non-existant from being so ill-fitting and stretched out, they tried my patience but I tried to make do with wrap-style covers to contain those oozy baby poos. We often had leaks, and I scrubbed a lot of yellow stains by hand. Nevertheless, this one blowout moment really takes the cake.

I was sitting on the couch with baby falling asleep across my lap, having just finished nursing. I started to hear and feel a bit of rumbling down there and knew a diaper change was imminent. This would be the first messy diaper change for us in about 8 days as she just was not having soiled diapers all that often (her doctor said this is normal for an EBF baby). In the back of my mind, I knew it would probably be pretty bad, but I could have had no idea. I decided to give it two minutes to make sure she was "finished" before carrying her upstairs to the change table.

About thirty seconds into my waiting period, I began to feel that warm dampness spreading on my thigh and knew that waiting was no longer a viable option. I picked her up and she looked content and very sweet in her cutest ever brand new set of sleepers from Grandma. I held her close against my white t-shirt as we walked up the stairs to the change table. The instant I set her down on the change table, I knew we were in for a doozy. The entire front of my white t-shirt was a yellow smear. More than half of her sleeper set, previously a sweet, soft blue color, was now a funky green. I looked down at my favorite pair of jeans. There were drips of yellow run-off all the way down the leg and onto my sock. I looked back at her, smiling happily on the change table, and stared in shock at her, up and down. The attached foot on one of her sleeper legs was completely, totally filled up with poop. It was sagging like there was a heavy golf ball in the end of the toe! I think I screamed out loud a little--how would I deal with this?

Obviously, everything got stripped off and thrown in a basin for the scrub of its life. Baby got wiped down with about half a pack of wipes before going straight into the bathtub (smiling all the way!). I was stripped down to my bra and underwear by this point too, having started to feel some seepage through my own clothes. It took about half an hour, but I finally got myself, Aurelia, and the change table area cleaned up. Then I went downstairs.

I was horrified to see what I had missed earlier--every second stair of the carpeted staircase I had walked up had drips of yellow leading back to the scene of the crime. I spent a further half an hour scrubbing the carpet free of any remaining mess.

Of course, the minute I was giving my hands their good final rinse, my phone rings. It was my husband, on his coffee break at work. "Hey honey," he began, "Whatcha up to?"

"You don't want to know..." I laughed.

We jokingly refer back to that day now as the "poonami" ;) I just thank my lucky stars that despite everything that happened, at least we were at home!

Please leave your hilariously horrific stories in the comments section as well! ;)

6 comments:

  1. hah, I love it...definitely not fun at the time but makes for great stories!
    For us, it seems IKEA causes our kiddos to have pooplosions. Our daughter had one, requiring only her clothes being changed thankfully, when we took her there at 2 weeks old. My first explosion while out and about!
    Then we were there with our son when he was about 4 or 5 months old. I had him riding in my pouch sling, we had just gotten to the area we wanted to look at, when I felt the rumbles...I figured "oh well, we'll keep meandering through the rest of the store and change him on the way out". And then I put my hand back where it had been resting, on his lower back...and it felt wet...so I asked my husband to check and sure enough, the poop had pretty much instantly made its way through the diaper...his clothes...and my lovely sling...ack. So we grabbed another diaper out of the diaper bag, and I quickly walked to the washrooms holding the diaper on the outside of us(looking like a moron no doubt,lol). Thank goodness IKEA has shortcuts!!

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  2. Too funny!
    I think my two worst blowout were both with disposables, which says a lot.
    The first was when we were travelling in Quebec city and I had to change DS in front of Chateau Frontenac. His clothes were covered in poop, but luckily I had packed a spare change of clothes for him. I was not so lucky, and so had to walk around in poop-smeared shorts all afternoon. I'm glad the shorts were a bright plaid material, because the yellow stains didn't show up.
    The second was at a friend's wedding reception, and I was holding DS so he was sitting against my chest (don't remember why I was holding him like that, but he seemed to enjoy it). All of a sudden I smelt the poop, and as I got ready to take him to the washrooms to change him I saw that it had leaked through his onesie and shorts and onto the bodice of my dress. Needless to say, we left pretty soon after that.

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  3. Oh my gosh! Both of those stories are hilarious and yet at the same time, I feel for you. I'm not trying to brag, but we have not had a single blowout or leak in our cloth dipes! A few times we have very nearly seen the poop try to escape up the back or out the legs, but everytime our diaper cover has done its job and kept us leak free! *knocks on wood*

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  4. So far, we have been lucky too with our cloth diapers. We only switched when DD was around 14 months, so we have "poosplosions" regualarily before that. It seemed like every single Sunday for a while, I would leave DD with DH and go to work. I would arrive home to some baby item, several items of clothes and towels covered with that signature color. Every. Single. Week. And then, there was the time right before I went back to work, DD and I were running errands with a friend, and stopped for lunch. I told my friend that I needed to change DD before we ate, and went directly into the bathroom. I opened up the diaper and NOTHING. No poopoo. Hmm, so I reached down to get the items needed for a change and heard the start. No extra clothes and DD was on the only blanket I brought. So, my hand went under that sweet butt to catch the nastiest poo EVER. But, I saved the cute clothes.

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  5. First of all, LLOL! (literally laughing out loud!) Secondly, I too have been lucky enough to report no poonamis with our cloth dipes! We've just had a few minor touchdowns onto her clothes. One time, though, I had to use 4 prefolds during a single change 'cause she kept pooing on each new one! That could have been a blow-out if it all went into a single dipe!

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  6. My single most memorable Poonami was in a disposable diaper (we hadn't switched to cloth diapers yet). Little I was about 3 or 4 months old at the time and EBF and hadn't gone in about 8 days (which was normal back then)and I knew it was coming soon. He and I were at our church's softball game, and I saw the familiar "poop face". Luckily, it was summer and warm enough for him to be in just a onesie. I stood up and (while holding Little I) reached to get my changing pad, diaper, and wipes. That's when I heard it. It sounded like someone was pouring something on the ground.. and when I looked down, I saw a HUGE puddle of poop. It was all down his legs, on his onesie, and on my shirt and pants. Oh man was I mortified. I hurried to change him and put on a new onesie, and rushed home. I'm pretty sure all 50+ people there got a good laugh, though.

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