Our firstborn son, Ryan, was 8 weeks old and it was time for me to go back to work. I really hated the idea of not being with Ryan all day, not seeing every little smile and hearing those little cooing sounds he made, but my husband and I thought we had the perfect plan for my return to work. My husband Dave works for a national cable-TV station four nights a week. We had opposite days off, and on the two days where we overlapped he would be with Ryan until 1 p.m., then take him over to our neighbor's house until I got home at 6 p.m. No daycare, no long hours at a baby sitter's and best of all, Ryan and Dave would get some real, quality, father-son time.
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.
The big day came: my first day back at work. Dave and I must have gone over Ryan's schedule a million times. I made all the bottles for the day, laid out three different outfits (in case of spit-up emergencies) and posted the numbers of the doctor, the hospital and what to do in case Ryan was choking on the refrigerator. I gave my son one more hug and Dave reassured me that they would be fine. I left with tears in my eyes.
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.
