Adventure at the Doc's!

At the KIPP baseball game

I called Aeli’s doctor from work; he had stayed home with aunties Tara and Nicole since he hadn’t been feeling well (read: a bit of barfing and slapping at his ears).  The appointment was at 2:30, and at 2:05, I called the ladies on my way home to get him.  They were still walking around in the French Quarter, so I decided to meet them wherever they were and swoop Aeli to get him to the appointment on time. 

He was strolling with Tia Tara on Bienville, so I instructed them to get to Governor Nichols to avoid the madness often induced by finding yourself trapped in a mess of tourists or abundant lefts because of all the one-way-streets.  By the time I pulled up, it was 2:15 and I was feeling stressed about making it to the doc’s by our scheduled time.  We executed a fabulously fast Chinese-fire-drill-style handoff of the baby, and even with the Quarter traffic, A and I were pulling into the doc office parking lot at 2:28.

He had fallen asleep in his seat.  I gently and hurriedly woke him up.  He rubbed his eyes, but didn’t cry.  Just reached up to hug my neck and clung to me like a baby monkey.  It was then that I noticed I hadn’t grabbed the diaper bag from Tia Tara in our frenzied pass-off.  “Oh well,” I thought.  “We won’t be here that long.”

But the dipe was already full.  I spent about forty seconds feeling like a bad mom, but what could I do now?  We walked into the office and signed in.

Waiting for the doctor was fine.  They don’t really have toys in all the individual exam rooms, and although I’m typically quite the opposite of a germaphobe, it just seems like babies shouldn’t be playing with things that other sick babies probably stuck all up in their mouths.  So I let him crawl around on the table, covered with that butcher paper, and he gets a kick out of tearing and crumpling it up. 

At last the Dr. L enters, and I feel validated in my concern when she peeks in his ears and sees that one is definitely infected.  She continues to examine him, listening to his breathing and heart, and prodding his abdomen.  To do this last part, she undoes his diaper, and she’s struggling for some reason.  She starts to just pull it down over his legs like underwear, and I’m like, “Oh, you can just unstrap it,” (as if she wouldn’t know the regular way diapers work, being a pediatrician), and I reached down to help, and found I couldn’t find the straps either.  Then I saw the giraffe’s tail and the number “4” and realized his diaper was on backwards. 

So we got it off so she could poke his belly more thoroughly, and realized that the current dipe was chock full of pee. 

“So we should throw this one away; we don’t wanna put this one back on,” she said.  “Do you have another one?”

“No, actually,” I sighed shamefully, and explained I had managed to forget the diaper bag in the hurry to pick him up earlier.

“Oh well,” she said, “Let’s just put his shorts back on.”

So we did and as she’s explaining the antibiotic prescription, Aeli proceeds to pee.  On the floor.  All over his shorts. 

So now I have a diaperless baby who is also pantsless, and nothing to change him into.  How am I going to put him in the carseat?  Just buckle right over his bare penis?  What happens when he pees in his seat?  Oh my gosh.  I was beginning to feel a surge of mom-failure.

Then the nurse had to come in and give him a shot that he was due for.  Fortunately, she’s probably the sweetest person on staff, and she doesn’t give me any sort of judgey look at all when she learns of the no-diaper-nor-pants situation. 

“Hmmm, I think we might have one,” she says.  “I think we only have itsy bitsy ones, though.  Let me check.”

So she comes back with a size one diaper.  (Size one, as you might have guessed, is suitable for newborns.  Aeli is almost 30 pounds.) 

“Maybe we can cover one cheek?” she jokes.  But that’s actually the truth.  We can get the strap around one leg- and one leg only- and the whole thing only comes up high enough to cover half of his crack.

Walking out of the doctor’s office, through the waiting room, past all the other actually prepared parents was akin to leaving a dorm room on the other side of campus wearing a slutty dress from the night before.  Maybe with a little vomit on it.  Like, “Yeah.  I know this is not ideal.”  I just kept my eyes on the door and my head held high, and strapped Aeli into his carseat with the mini-dipe positioned under his butt as best as I could. 

You know.  Momhood.