Did you know that a maternity bra also performs quite admirably as a spit-up retention reservoir? Surprising, but true. Let me explain...
Evan doesn't return very much of his food, but every once in a while he coughs up a
doozy. Well, today was one of those whiles. Usually when one of these Vesuvius events happens it is a struggle to contain the eruption before it reaches clothing (yours... keeping it off his is pretty much hopeless) and furniture. It's not so much an issue of dispersal patterns and flow rates, at least not at first. The problem comes down to hand quantity - you only have two - and baby
wiggliness.
As for your hands, one of them is holding the baby, and it's really in
everyone's best interest if you don't try and do anything else with this hand. If there's one thing I've learned so far it's that moms
do not approve of baby juggling. Anyway, the other hand is probably heavily involved in whatever you were doing with the baby at the time. If that happens to be burping him, you're usually in pretty good shape. Your second hand is whacking the baby, so it's mostly free, and you've already got some type of absorbent rag around (we use cloth diapers for this). Furthermore, you were already
trying to make something come out of the baby's mouth - you shouldn't be too surprised if you get more than just air (thus the absorbent rag).
Here's where the second factor - baby
wiggliness - comes into play. As most of you know, babies are phenomenally wiggly creatures. This is why giving an infant a sponge bath can be such a terrifying experience ("Let's take our tiny baby who likes to make sudden jerky movements and douse him in soapy water while we hold him over the kitchen sink" sounds like the premise of a
Bad Idea Jeans commercial). So when you burp a baby you try to position the cloth where you think he's pointing, but that can change rapidly and without warning.
This is exactly what happened to
Steph. Evan had finished eating (or at least he was resting - he often goes back for seconds, sometimes thirds), so
Steph draped a diaper over her shoulder and started burping him. And it was working just fine... until Evan threw his head to the side and emptied his stomach onto her chest. Maybe he didn't find this meal to be up to his standards and he was sending it back to the kitchen. More likely it was just a convergence of random factors. Whatever the reason, it was a mess.
Or rather, it should have been a mess. Normally you'd be flailing around for an extra burp cloth, receiving blanket, or dish towel (the one you had prepared for this being pinned under the baby on your shoulder, and we've already discussed the prohibition against baby juggling) to try and keep the spit-up contained. Before doing this
Steph took a moment to assess the situation, though, and to her pleasant surprise what did she find? With the exception of a drop or two on the baby's chin all of the effluent had been trapped inside her maternity bra! And this was not just a delaying action. She had time to pass the baby off to me, stand up, walk calmly through the house to our bathroom, and dump the spit-up down the sink. This took at least 20 seconds, and there was no leakage whatsoever... a truly remarkable performance by the bra.
Now, I don't want to give the impression that there were no losers in this game. The bra clearly had to be laundered, and
Steph was... how best to put this... taken aback by the whole affair. But in balance, I have to declare this event a major victory for the
Metz family. No other clothing had to be cleaned (and as you may know, we've become
a little sensitive about laundry issues), not even the baby's, no furniture had to be cleaned, no one got hurt, and everyone had a good laugh (although in Evan's case it may have been more of a sinister snicker). We had to pay no real consequences for being caught woefully unprepared for a baby explosion, and we owe it all to a maternity bra.
Which brings me to my main point. Why don't the bra manufactures highlight this feature in their advertising?
Steph has looked through a number of specialty maternity catalogs (I peek over her shoulder sometimes, but I just read the articles) and they never mentioned anything about spit-up. I think they're missing a major opportunity to expand into new markets here! Had I known a maternity bra could help deal with spit-up so well I might have been persuaded to buy one of my own, and I don't think I'm the only guy out there who would feel this way. OK, maybe I am, but I think this issue could be addressed with the proper marketing campaign. After all, there are apparently some men who like to wear women's undergarments when they get no real utility from them, so the barrier isn't quite as high as you might think. Just imagine who else might consider it if you could show off the practical benefits. They could sell them at The Sharper Image (The
PIDI - Pectoral Infant Discharge Inhibitor), claim it was of European design, give it some kind of masculine logo. I don't know, I'm not a marketing guy, but I think this could work.
You may think he is missing out on seeing the world, but his eyes can't see much of the world yet anyway, and he says he appreciates the feeling of comfort he gets from knowing he can plop his face forward at any moment and take a nap on my chest (a privilege of which he avails himself pretty much the whole time he's in the carrier). I say this picture is of us "in a similar situation" because I was alone on this walk, so there are no photos of the actual event. Fortunately the whole family had done the walk a day or two earlier and we brought the camera then.
