The Curious Case of the Diaper in the Nighttime

All day yesterday I was thinking about a post with this title. Lately, we occasionally hear a strange banging through the monitor, and in the morning we find objects in Clio's crib with her- generally clothing that's sitting on the rocking chair next to the crib. The other day she had a wet diaper in there. To explain this is to expose another example of careless parenting, but what the heck, here goes: we don't have a diaper genie. We don't even have a diaper bucket in Clio's room. This is largely because we started in cloth diapers and maybe we haven't fully admitted that we're not going back. So diapers end up on top of the cloth diaper pail while we're executing the impossible task of changing Clio. sometimes we forget to wrap them up and throw them away.

It's not really such a curious case- we left the diaper out, she reached through the bars, and presto! Icky situation.

But this morning.....
Dave went in to get her, and I heard him make some kind of exclamation- enough to get me worried that something was really, really wrong. As it turns out, Clio was covered in poop. The crib was covered in poop. The crib bars had poopy fingerprints, and the wall had poopy hand prints. A pair of pants from the rocking chair was in the crib with her, and the rocking chair had its own poop trail on the seat.

It reminded me of the first time we took our cats to the vet, when I was about 15. We got a carrier for them, one of those big plastic ones, and on the way home they were so terrified, and - yes- so relieved, that they relieved themselves, and because the carrier was plastic, they slip and slided all over the place, and ended up just covered in their own poop.

So we really did end up with a mysterious case of a diaper in the nighttime. Upon closer examination, Clio's diaper was heavily soiled on the outside; clearly, she took it off at some point in the night, before the pooping began. We have no idea when this occurred, or how long she spent trying to claw her way out of the crib before we got her up.

The funny thing is, she didn't seem too bothered by any of this until we got her into the bath, at which point she clung to me like there was no tomorrow.

When I get home tonight I'll post the picture we had the good sense to take of a smiling Clio, before we washed the poop off her face.