So many things have changed, in the world of babies. I can remember Mom saying, as she looked at Belle’s and Zappa’s tiny little newborn clothes, that baby clothes were soooo cute nowadays, compared to how they were back in her day. I couldn’t have agreed more. My babies’ outfits were simply adorable.

But not nearly as adorable as the baby clothes now. Modern babies have the cutest clothes I’ve ever seen.

But I digress. I am not going to blog about baby clothes. At least, not the outer ones.

No, this blog is about diapers. Kind of.

Disposables have been around for a long time now. Heck, my brother is in his forties, and Mom used to buy disposables for long trips, etc, for him even back then. They did not, however, have the tape-tabs; she still had to use diaper pins on the early disposables.

By the time Belle and Zappa came along, much had improved. Tape tabs. I was so glad, because as I am unbelievably clumsy, one of my fears was of injuring my precious baby with a sharp pointy jab to the hip.

I would have liked to use cloth diapers, but I had no laundry facilities till later.

Both my babies were born in June. It’s hot, in June. Therefore, on occasion, my tiny babies wore only a diaper around the house. Or their grandparents’ houses. (I NEVER took them out in public in only a diaper, though. It’s just not classy. Not then, not now, not ever.)

Elastic-leg diapers existed, but they hadn’t for long. The early Huggies had elastic that was too tight; it created such a lack of air-flow across the buttal area that babies had the most fantastically awful cases of diaper rash you could ever imagine. Not many babies could ‘take’ the elastic legs on those early diapers. Belle couldn’t, and neither could Zappa.

Therefore, I counted my blessings that at least I had Pampers. Pampers never let me down.

Oh wait. Yes they did.

I am about to put in writing something that parents of babies are never told about beforehand.

I am going to talk about. . . . poopie balls.

Yes. You all know about them. Admit it.

Your baby is wearing a non-elastic diaper. Your baby is crawling all around the house. You are, as usual, exhausted. You are content just to watch the baby play. Suddenly you see something on the carpet. It looks vaguely like a malted milk ball. You look closer. You realize what it is. It’s poop. Poop, shaped like a marble. It’s a poopie-ball. You are horrified. Then you see another one. And another. You realize that your baby is leaving a trail of poopie-balls all over the room. They are falling out of the leg-holes of the diaper. You walk around the house, bent double, picking up poopie-balls. Sometimes, you have to crawl. You have a handful of poopie-balls. You dash into the bathroom and drop the handful into the toilet. You rush back into the room, where your baby is still crawling about, leaving a trail behind her/him. You wonder just how many poopie-balls one small baby could possibly make in few minutes’ time. You find out.

If your baby is wearing footie-jams, the poopie-balls sometimes drop down into the feet, and get crushed between the baby’s toes. This totally grosses out all the little piggies. It even grosses out the baby’s mommy and daddy. It’s quite possibly the first thing your baby has ever done or produced that mommy and daddy do not find adorable. Sometimes, the footie-jams get tossed into the washer with poopie-balls still inside the feet. They do not wash out. Sometimes, these same footie-jams get tossed into the dryer. This makes an unfortunate circumstance even more unfortunate, as the dryer heat makes the poopie-balls shrink just enough that they can travel up the leg and out the snappie-holes, and become wedged in the vent-holes of the dryer. These vent-holes must be scraped out with human fingers. Your fingers. Poopie that has been through the washer and dryer is really hard to remove from under your fingernails. Poopie that has been washed and dried is still not clean. It’s still poopie.

Plus, your entire load of laundry is streaked with brown and smells like shit.

All in all, a memorable cycle. It’s enough to make you go out and buy Huggies again. Maybe your baby has outgrown the terrible rash that happens when a moist buttie is encased in man-made materials with no ventilation whatsoever. You give it one more try. Your baby breaks out in a rash that would interest the Guinness Book, and quite possibly the Child Welfare.

You sigh, and go back to Pampers. And you get used to walking around your house bent double, because you never do get all the poopie-balls at one fell swoop; there are always poopie-balls to be found later. Usually when you have company.

Don’t forget to check the couch cushions, either. Your baby loves to stand up on the sofa. Poopie-balls fall out of the diaper every time the baby moves. Poopie-balls love to hide between the cushions. When you find those suckers later, it’s usually because they’ve ripened and freshened your living room with eau d’pooparoma.

Be sure to check your pants, too. Sit on a poopie-ball and you’ve got a little brown circle on your butt. Every parent you see will know exactly what it is. And they will laugh. And then they will say to their spouse, “I don’t have one on ME, do I?” And many times, they will. And then they will stop laughing.

The only thing worse than walking around bent double picking up poopie-balls, is slinging poopie that is not of a texture to form anything solid. This consistency will be dealt with in another post.

To prepare you for this future post, I leave you with this word: projectile.

Malted milk ball, anyone?