Our daughter was born seven years after our youngest son. It had been a very long time since we had done the whole “baby thing.” One would think that once you have a baby, you always remember all of the things you’re supposed to do to take care of a baby, right?
(Wrong.)
Our daughter was born just after midnight after more than twenty four hours of labor. The few hours after her birth were exhausting. She would cry, I would feed her. After I would feed her, my husband would take her to burp her so I could get some sleep. Then, when she’d cry again, he’d hand her back to me and he’d sleep while I nursed her. As the hours passed by, her crying became more intense. Feeding her wouldn’t help. She was screaming and crying and nothing I did would comfort her. At some point, I started to cry. “I don’t know what to do.” I sobbed. The nurse walked over and asked if I had fed her. “All night!” I said. “Did you burp her?” She asked. “Yes!” I replied. “Did you change her diaper?”
Ummmmm. I looked over at my husband. “Oh my God. DIAPERS! We forgot about diapers!” We were both mortified. My poor baby was soaking wet. We hadn’t even THOUGHT about changing her diaper. Apparently, we forgot about the whole “changing the diaper” thing.
It’s crazy, right? That we forgot that we would have to change our baby’s diaper? I mean, that’s something you wouldn’t think a parent would forget, right?
But let me tell you, once we were reminded, it all came flooding back to us.
When you have a newborn, you will be changing diapers a lot. Every day, all day and all night long. How often? You may ask. The answer is, well, it depends. You’ll definitely be changing diapers 24 hours a day in the beginning. Sometimes once an hour, sometimes three times an hour. When you leave the house, always be prepared with plenty of diapers so you’re never caught off guard and without a diaper to change the baby.
I’m pretty sure you’ll never forget that your baby needs to be changed like we did. No one could possibly be as forgetful (dumb?) as we were!
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You are not alone. This was absolutely me in February. My twins are 3.5 and when we had our daughter in February, the boys were still in the final stages of potty training, but I only had to change their pullup about 2x a day. So once we got my daughter home from the hospital I didn’t think about changing her more frequently. Not having a nurse to point out the obvious to me, I changed a couple of very heavy diapers before I remembered to do it more often.