I’ve got a 3 week-old newborn. During the day there are plenty of adorable moments and easy times. But it’s the middle of the fucking night, he strategically waited until I was switching diapers to piss on me and all over, then was flailing his arms and pushing the bottle out of his mouth even though he was very hungry, then shit his GODDAMN BRAINS OUT while eating, then after I burped him and cleaned him up and got him in new clothes and swaddled and put him down, he fucking screamed until I picked him up again.
Like, I’ve given him everything his tiny little brain and body could need. That coupled with the strategic shitting and pissing to require the absolute maximum amount of work from me.
The vent here, I guess, is that I fucking hate this. I loved my life with my wife and now we have next to zero intimacy(not sex, obviously, but even our normal physical touch). We have zero time for each other, one is tending the baby, while the other is desperately trying to keep up with cleaning bottles and keeping the house passably clean and there is no time for anything.
I would never let any of what I just said affect how I interact with the baby, but I’m fucking sick of having literally zero independence and I miss my wife (her being in the same bed and next to me most of the day makes it worse somehow).
Fuck.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Check out The Oatmeal, they’ve got a comic about having kids that’s painfully applicable.
Oof. I had one do that a few times. I was shocked because that particular kid had great bladder control, generally. It sure seemed calculated.
In his case, the second time it happened, I realized he had been waiting to get out of a full diaper, because he knew peeing then would soak his clothes.
And once the diaoer was off, I think he wanted to pee quick before the next diaper went on, because he didn’t like the feeling of a wet diaper, and he knew I wouldn’t check it for a bit right after a change.
It gave me some comfort to realize he wasn’t just being obnoxious on purpose. He was just trying to solve a rare problem in his own clever way with the few options he had.
I ended up switching to diapers with the color change stripe, which I think helped him relax about peeing in the diaper, knowing I would notice the full diaper sooner. Once he understood the change, I recall that stopped happening.
Of course another change was I got quick with the spare diaper cover, for him.
With every other kid, they just peed randomly, so I was always careful with that spare diaper. The only reason this guy nailed me a couple times was that he had great bladder control, other than in that rare situation.