Poopsplosion!

At Community Hospital of Los Gatos they use Pampers diapers (Pampers Swaddlers Newborn to be exact). It should come as no surprise that this was a good decision on the hospital's part. (Have I mentioned how pleased we were with the care we received at the hospital? We were extremely impressed with everything about CHLG, including the little bit of experience we've had with them outside of Labor & Delivery. Everyone should have their babies there.) Sure, they probably picked Pampers because they got a sweet deal from some rep, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a good decision.

Why do I say this, you ask? How could I have developed such strong opinions about diaper manufacturers in such a short amount of time? Well, first there is my propensity for developing strong opinions. But even more important are the statistics. Evan was born on Saturday, and between the supply of diapers we brought home from the hospital and another pack we'd been given we were able to keep him wrapped in Pampers exclusively until sometime Thursday evening... let's call it five and a half days. In this time we had absolutely zero diaper integrity breaches. The Pampers absorbed pee. They gobbled up meconium. They contained poop of all colors, shapes, consistencies, and quantities. In short, if Evan could produce it, the diapers could cope with it.

Unfortunately, our supply of Pampers was finite. When they were gone, we had to fall back on a package of Huggies someone had given us. At the time we didn't view this as "falling back" at all. We just thought "This baby's butt is now clean, I should cover it so the things around him can also be clean. Oh look, a diaper." Why wouldn't the Huggies perform the same? They were Newborn size. They had extra gathers around the legs. They had Baby Shaped Fit® (what a joke). They even had a scoop-front top so we didn't have to fold the edge of the diaper over to avoid the monstrous scab that is the remains of Evan's umbilical cord. Sadly, what they didn't have was the ability to absorb, contain, or at times even impede the flow of baby urine and feces. Between sometime mid-afternoon Thursday and mid- to late-morning Friday we had to deal with three peesplosions and two poopsplosions. We had to wash Steph's robe three times. THREE TIMES! In half a day! The kid's stomach is the size of a large walnut. Even if you allow for the possibility that he only produces waste once for every two feedings (which, by the way, is totally not the case) how can it be that the amount of urine rendered in a single emission is great enough to overwhelm the resources of a product ostensibly designed exclusively for the management of said urine to the point that it comes spurting out the back of the diaper? That's right, it didn't just leak out at the legs (that would make sense... it would almost be excusable), it spewed up his back. Let me say that again... with the aid of a Huggies diaper my son peed on his own back. It's not like there's a spigot back there. Trust me, I checked. The only spigot is in the front, where it should be. I'm not even going to try to describe the poopsplosions. The horror. Oh, the horror.

So, in the final telling, what can we learn from our diaper integrity statistics? Over approximately 132 hours Pampers leaked 0 times. Over around 12 hours Huggies leaked 5 times. Mathematically speaking, that makes Pampers (divide by 12... carry the 2...) infinitely better than Huggies. Fortunately, the majority of our strategic diaper reserve for the next stage of baby growth (size 1) is Pampers, so there is hope for the future. And I suppose I should make the (somewhat obvious) disclaimer that the sample size of this study is one baby. Maybe Huggies have worked great for you in the past. Maybe they'll work wonderfully for you in the future. But for me, in the present, I'm not letting the Pampers stock dip below critical levels again. The alternative is just ugly... and smelly too (and I've heard that only gets worse).

This is not a picture of a poopsplosion. In fact, we don't have any pictures of a poopsplosion. Had I even tried to take a photo during the last incident it is very possible I would not be with you blogging today. This is instead our first diaper sausage. Steph analogizes them to some type of boa constrictor relative (maybe a diaper constrictor?). Think of this as a photo of the distant aftermath of a poopsplosion.