Rookie Dad: The diapers are all about advertising

Since opening that very first package of diapers waaaay back last November I had wondered about the cartoon characters whose likenesses adorned nearly every inch of The Youngling's earth-destroying butt covers. When did this trend start? Are the diaper conglomerates paid to print the cartoons? Are the cartoons there for a reason?

Rather than do some sort of meaningful research about diaper cartoons, I chose to speculate. Diaper cartoons exist so that in complete darkness a parent can find the stack of diapers. But wait, wouldn't plain white be more visible at night than a myriad of colorful cartoon characters? Actually white is more visible so maybe the butt cartoons are all about he almighty dollar.

Let's assume that huge diaper conglomerates do receive some enormous kickback for printing Winnie the Pooh and Elmo on their products. What do we as parents gain from this? I can say for certain that we don't receive a lower price because paying $20-$30 for something that always ends up in the trash is the best scam ever - and even better if the diaper companies are getting a cartoon kickback and screwing parents.

The big three brands, Huggies, Pampers and Luvs, all have some sort of cartoons splashed across the available real estate of their respective diapers and it hasn't resulted in lower prices so maybe my kickback theory is backwards. Maybe the diaper companies, in some misguided effort to make their products more visually appealing, are paying to use the likeness of Elmo and Winnie the Pooh. If that's the case, I'd prefer my diapers how I like my rice - plain and white.

Rookie Dad: She's in the Army

The Youngling is amazingly well-tempered. She will sit for 30 minutes at a time in the living room on the floor playing with what I affectionately call toy mountain. She doesn't care if anyone is around but she has her own special way of letting you know that she is either bored, hungry, tired, in need of a new diaper or is just curious what is happening in the other corners of the house. She army crawls to where she thinks you might be. But if you're not there, she'll put herself in a precarious situation.

Those situations have included almost climbing in to the refrigerator because I make my lunch for the day with the refrigerator door wide open. I'll chalk that one up to The Youngling being curious about my wasting of electricity.

She has also closed herself in her bedroom because one of her latest hobbies is opening and closing doors. Yes, she actually closed her bedroom door and proceeded to stay sitting against the back side of it. After a minute of being patient and slight pushing, The Youngling took the hint and crawled away ever so slowly from the door. Yep, just over ten months in and she's already trying to keep us old geezers out of her bedroom.

Rookie Dad: I'm a prisoner

It's official. We've finally walled off the living room. No, it's not my own recreation of the Berlin wall. It's actually more of a gate. In fact. it is actually a gate. One of two gates the we will eventually have in place to keep The Youngling from ending up stuck behind the dryer way out in the laundry room if one of us turns our head for a second or two.

Even though she is still in army crawl mode, The Youngling can really move. Just yesterday as I stood at the bottom of the backs steps of our house, after placing the little girl far away in the living room, she had made her way through about forty feet of house and was tapping her tiny hands against the screen door wondering what was taking me so long. I just turned my head and said, as if she could understand me, that the sweet corn doesn't husk itself.

These are the battles that occupy a weekend in our house. On a more proud note, after over nine months I finally gave The Youngling a bath all by myself. She didn't scream, she didn't attempt to drown herself and she came out at least somewhat clean - all without using the tub as a toilet.
Now if I can just find a gate to span the ultra-wide entry way in to the living room The Youngling will finally be contained - for a few weeks.

Rookie Dad: The case of the curious wino

It all started Tuesday. As I waited at home for the entire day to get The Youngling in to see a doctor (I suppose I should schedule her illnesses) I let the little terror crawl around the house. She seems bored and disinterested already with the stereo, VCR, DVD player and stack of various Nintendo consoles. Her new fascination is the wine rack.

The wine rack is one of those items in a household that can not be banished to some distant corner or some high up location. It's a necessity in the world of raising children but it also poses a certain amount of danger to a nine month old girl.

Her latest encounter with the wine rack found her pulling out a large carafe-style bottle of wine I picked up on clearance somewhere. I knew she had it dislodged from the rack when I heard a mighty "thud" on the dining room floor.

It seems that she knows what to go for and while I applaud The Youngling's good tastes, I should probably make sure she steers clear of the wine for about another 20 years - or at least until she is no longer in danger of crushing her hand with a large jug of wine.

Rookie Dad: The tub is not a toilet

Late on a Saturday is not the optimal time for bathing a nearly 8 month old child. There are so many other things I'd rather be doing. Having a front row seat to The Youngling using our tub as a toilet was not one of those things.

Chalk it up to a rushed 4th of July holiday or our own forgetfulness but whatever the case, our little girl got her bath just before her bedtime and apparently splashing around in the water at that time of the evening confused her. All was going well as we soaped her up and scrubbed her down. I had the in-the-tub duty of holding/controlling the squirmy splasher and the wife scrubbed from a safe distance.


Then it happened. Simultaneously we saw something dark on the bottom of the tub. It seemed to float from under The Youngling. Eww, eww, eww. We both screamed a bit which caused the baby to scream too. Out of the tub to towel her off and scrub the tub. A few minutes later we tried it all again. I stood in the water to hold the little scrapper and the wife again soaped and scrubbed her. Then we saw something again. For the second time in less than ten minutes something slowly crept towards my submerged feet. The darkness of this particular shape made us both scream eww, eww, eww again as the poop seemed to hone in on me. This bit of deja vu again led to the baby screaming again.
We then repeated the whole process over again.

I don't think I'll ever look at my feet (or the tub) the same way again.

Rookie Dad: She's a paper shredder

The Youngling has a new mode of transportation. It's called "rolling". She's been pretty gung-ho about this for the past week or so and it's gotten to the point where i f us adults need to get something done, we can lay her down on the living room floor and she entertains herself. She's practically grown up now.

The Youngling's rolling, though, isn't entirely fun and games. Last Sunday morning I wanted to grab a glass of juice so the logical thing to do was to lay her down on the floor with a couple toys so I can have my glass of Kiwi-Strawberry goodness. Gone for less than a minute, I returned to find The Youngling half way across the room from where I had left her with her head between the entertainment center and the magazine rack crinkling and slowly tearing pages out of the latest issue of Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine. It was both cute and infuriating. I hadn't even finished reading it yet!

This is the start of even bigger things. Before we know it she'll be crawling. She has already figured out how to push herself backwards so the next logical step is forward movement. I guess I can give up on reading any of my magazines - or I can relocate everything of value to the top of the refrigerator.

Rookie Dad: Is grass a friend or enemy?

So it seems that The Youngling is determined to become more mobile than dad is prepared for. In recent days, she has moved from the classic belly scoot to a full-on army crawl to the occasional real crawl. We've had to remove the magazine rack, vases, a lamp or two and will soon have to imprison ourselves in a gated fortress. Yep, baby gates are coming whenever dad gets sick of pulling The Youngling out of corners and away from items better left alone - including the coffee table which she stands at now and thrashes remotes about.

The items better left alone category is a broad one. In the past couple weeks she has unplugged controllers from my Nintendo Gamecube, ejected a DVD from the DVD player, stuck her hand in the VCR slot and pulled dad's classic Nintendo 64 system down to the floor. The quick solution was to park her walker/car in front of the entertainment center but that's like a band-aid on a hand grenade wound.

The definite way, thus far, to keep The Youngling firmly anchored in one spot is to sit all nine months of her in the grass. I'm fairly certain that she's either deathly afraid of the lawn or she is afraid of messing up the perfect order of the blades of grass. I don't really care which one is true or if either is true because anything that keeps her in one place for a few minutes without rearranging everything in a room is good for me. But winter is just around the corner so the lawn jail will only last so long...