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June 15, 1999 |
Until Ryan was born, Dave really hadn't been around kids much, much
less a slightly colicky 8-week-old. I was a little nervous, but I figured it
was much better than daycare and somehow we would work it all out. I
just kept reminding myself what a great thing that Dave was doing and
how lucky I was to be married to him. Drama Queen Contestants Mike Tuciarone Queen Elvis Kathy Schmidt I called them when I got to work and Dave said everything was great. "Don't worry," he said, "we'll be fine." So with that, I decided to try and put them out of my mind for a little while and get back to the piles of papers that had built up on my desk for eight weeks. About an hour later the phone rang. When I heard Dave's voice on the other end I just about dropped the phone and ran out the door. Something horrible must have happened if he's calling me, I thought. I yelled into the phone "What happened, is Ryan OK, where are you, where's Ryan, what's wrong?" "Well, we had a little accident," he said. "What!" I yelled again into the phone as I was grabbing my keys ready to head out the door. "Don't worry, nothing major," Dave said. "Ryan is fine." "OK, well then, what's wrong?" I asked, trying to calm myself down, as I had begun to elicit some stares from people around my office. "Well, I was giving Ryan a bath, and that went fine. Then I got him dressed and I was holding him, walking downstairs, when I felt something wet on my chest. Then Ryan made that face -- you know, when he has to poop -- and, well, then I felt that on my shirt too." He hesitated. "I kinda forgot to put his diaper on when I got him dressed after his bath." "How could you forget to put his diaper on?" I asked, thinking that maybe this was Dave's way of making me feel better that I was at work and not at home. "Well, I've never given him a bath before and every time I've changed him I've taken a diaper off, then put one on immediately after. But this time I was so worried about getting him dressed after his bath I just started to put on his clothes from the pile that you left out for us, and I guess I just forgot." I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry now -- I mean, I just couldn't understand how someone could forget to put a diaper on an 8-week-old child. Wasn't this one of the first things we learned in that parenting class we took, how to change a diaper? If a daycare provider were telling me this story I would have stormed out right then and there, picked up Ryan and never gone back. But this wasn't just a daycare provider, it was my husband and Ryan's father. I took a deep breath and laughed. Dave seemed relieved that I was laughing, and he laughed, too. "I'm glad you left more clothes out," he said, "but I swear, this time I remembered to put a diaper on." "You put the diaper on Ryan, right?" I said, just to get one last zing in. "Funny, Kathy, very funny," he said. We now have a second child, a little girl named Hannah. I am still working full time and Dave is still taking care of the kids three days a week. Dave always tells me that he feels so lucky to be able to spend so much time with the kids, even if he doesn't do things exactly the way I might like him to. He has never forgotten to put on a diaper again, though he still needs some improvement with putting on Hannah's clothes the right way. But it's nothing major. As a friend of mine said to me recently, no one has been scarred for life from wearing their clothes backwards. Mike Tuciarone | Queen Elvis | Kathy Schmidt | Vote now!
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