Where The Hell Is Alan Funt When You Really Need Him?

I read Erica's post on the horror of discovering that you're out of baby wipes and thought I'd share my own, rather charming story.

Yes, this has happened to me. Worse, it happened to me the day my older daughter was born. Her mother, never one to miss an opportunity to remind everyone around her that they're stupid and she's not, refused to let me live it down. She mentioned it in virtually every quarrel we had for the remainder of our marriage, and had my lawyer not conveniently forgotten to put it in there, she would have had it included in our divorce papers.

Here's what happened: Our daughter was born at roughly 2:30 pm. Evanston Hospital's equivalent of the Keystone Cops (I swear, the routine they had for getting a newborn under the rolling french fry lamp was one nurse in lingerie short of a Benny Hill sketch) counted her fingers and toes (which I'd already done, thank you) and made her cry (holding up little Olympic Judge Score Cards: 5.9, 5.9, 5.8, 5.7, 6.0...some guy named Apgar apparently invented a difficulty factor for the newborn's first angry hollers at the world). Once mom and I had had a chance to exchange a few furtive glances with the baby, the green-clad Greek Chorus of pediatric nurses whisked our new baby away for a valve job and an oil change.

We, new parents that we were, were shown to a maternity room, where we were allowed to make exhorbitantly expensive phone calls to everyone we knew, until they came and took my ex-wife away for breast-feeding class. Apparently, it takes a certain amount of knowledge to do things naturally; who knew?

While my ex-wife (who, for the sake of clarification, was still my future ex-wife at that time) was in class, one of the nurses wheels my daughter in with one of those combination bassinette-and-AV-cart things, one wheel wobbling and squeaking like a high-mileage shopping cart. She (the nurse) speaks to me like I am a slow five year old, which is to say that she spoke a little too loudly and a lot too chirrupy: "Hello, Dad! Is Mom in class?"

I nod and clutch at the air, as if trying to find my blankie, which I haven't needed since I was 4. No, actually, I didn't do that, but I am sure that's how Nurse Patronizing saw me.

"Well, would you like to spend some time with your daughter while you wait for Mom to come back?"

I am all eagerness. This is my chance to commence spoiling my daughter, a process which will take the rest of my life, if done properly.

The nurse looks dubious. "Will you be okay if I leave you two alone?"

Sure! What can go wrong?

She clucks as though she knows a whole host of things that can go wrong and firmly believes that I would never understand any of them. Though it's obviously against her better judgement, she leaves me alone with my daughter.

I don't remember much of that first father-daughter conversation we had, and I suspect that my daughter doesn't, either. Since I abhor "goo-goo" noises, I probably began speaking to her like an adult right then...a habit I have maintained for 16 1/2 years. (This is a particularly good habit to have, especially since she would abhor "goo-goo" noises now.)

But at some point in the conversation, she turned momentarily purple, and then let out an enormous wet fart, followed by a tiny sigh of relief. I didn't have to be William Petersen to recognize she needed a diaper change. I looked under the bassinette, and sure enough, disposable diapers! I'm ready to go.

So...I open the current diaper, and it is filled with toxic waste that I am sure would have been rejected as unsafe by the State of Nevada. I am amazed that one tiny wet fart could have produced so much volume. I am further amazed that so much volume could have come from such a tiny baby.

The stuff was roughly the consistency of...well, halfway between spackle and roofing tar.

I look for something to wipe her little bottom. There is nothing. Well, there was something. Gauze pads. I quickly discovered that dry gauze pads do not make effective baby wipes. In fact, they are about as ineffective in that role as it gets.

My daughter, with apparently no trouble at all this time, unleashes another load of blackish-green goo. And then another. There is so much gunk in her diaper now that I am seriously concerned that if it happens again, she will will begin to look like an underinflated basketball.

Frantically, I check all of the drawers in the room. No wipes. What kind of hospital is this? I wheel my daughter and her goopy diaper out into the hallway, looking for a nurse. (As we go, I have one hand driving the AV cart and one hand desperately gripping both of my daughter's wrists and ankles, as I try to keep her from delightedly smearing herself in her own shit. Seriously, Charlie Chaplin would have been inspired.) I go to the nurse's station, and there are...NO NURSES!

There are also no baby wipes in view.

By now, I am beginning to panic. I have been left alone with my daughter for fifteen whole minutes and it has been a disaster. I am torn between the sense that this is a Special Occaision (my daughter's First Shit Ever) and the certain knowledge that if I don't do something fast, I will be reduced to a cautionary tale for pediatric nurses for years to come.

How is it that I am the only person on the ward when this happens? Did the nurses take all the baby wipes with them when they went to their meeting in the cafeteria? Are they watching me on the closed-circuit security cameras? Yes, that's what it is...there's no breast feeding class! All of the females on the ward have gathered in some small, dark room filled with baby wipes to watch as New Dad wheels his wildly shitting newborn around the ward, bellowing "A wipe! A wipe! MY KINGDOM FOR A WIPE!"

Then, Clint Eastwood came to me in a vision. Just as he did in "Heartbreak Ridge", he growled, "You improvise, you adapt, you overcome!"

So, I wet some paper towels and did the best I could.

The results were...well...less than acceptable. But, at least I could give her a fresh diaper and wrap her up again.

Forty-five minutes later, my then-future-ex-wife strolls in to the room with two nurses in tow. They are laughing. She tells me she is ready to feed our daughter now, and I...confess everything.

There is a moment of shocked silence, during which the whole thing becomes my fault, apparently because I am the only one in the room with testicles. The nurses coo over the baby and take her away for a bath, while my then-future-ex-wife explains to me that she always knew that I would be a shitty father. (I take some small satisfaction in the knowledge that she didn't think I would literally be a shitty father. At least I exceeded her expectations in that regard.)

And I never did find out where they kept the damn baby wipes.