Welcome To My World Of Poo

What can I write about but what I spend all my time doing: diapers and nursing. There isn’t much to say about nursing, except that Hanix eats ALL THE FRICKIN TIME. Which probably is because he’s busy growing huge-er. He’s already wearing “6 month” sized clothing… and he’s just 6 weeks old. So nursing can be summed up by two words: “boring” and “continuous”.

Diapers, on the other hand, make up the more exciting part of my new lifestyle. Brace yourself for a thrilling post.

Yesterday I had a pile of particularly soiled diapers and baby clothes. I have to wash diapers every day or I run out of clean ones by the next morning. Actually I don’t run out of the cloth diapers – just the diaper wraps, those things that supposedly keep Hanix’s clothes clean and dry, except none of them do, which is why he wears six outfits a day.

(If you know of a really great diaper wrap, or cloth diaper solution, let me know. We go through so many diapers a day – probably on account of the constant nursing.)

So, as I do every morning, I take the stinky pile downstairs to my mother-in-law’s laundry sink, which is outside. I scoop water from the right half of the sink into the left half, which has a bottom that is basically a washboard. The right half is a basin that has no drain and is filled by a hose that’s been wired into place.

I scrub, scrub, scrub all the poo away. Only then can I throw everything into the washing machine, because the machine is pretty weak, and wouldn’t be able to do the job on its own. The most annoying part of this isn’t the poo. It’s the flies and mosquitoes that molest me while I do the scrubbing. And the dead rat smell wafting over from the neighbors' junk pile.

Also, so far, all the soaps and detergents I’ve tried down here have a really horrible perfume. I’m told that they “smell like clean’, but I find them all awful. I’m still searching for laundry soap that doesn’t have perfumes as a main ingredient; non-perfumed would be a dream. I really detest them. They smell so funky rank.

Oh, and there’s no hot water, neither for the sink nor the machine.

When the machine is halfway through its cycle, it just quits for some reason. So I have to stick around so I can jumpstart it again by pushing a button and then banging the lid with my fist. (I’m serious.)

When it finishes I haul everything up my staircase/ladder to the roof and hang everything up on the laundry lines… to get covered in dust from the highway. Sometimes it rains in the afternoon and I have to run and take down all the laundry and then rehang it when the rain stops.

So this gets to happen every day. It takes a long time, because Hanix never sleeps long enough for me to finish any one part of the process at once. So sometimes it’s not until the afternoon that I get the laundry up on the line, and then I risk it not drying in time for diaper call the next morning…

Yesterday was worse, though, because after I finally got the whole scrubbed batch of laundry in the machine, it began filling with some kind of filthy, black water, and resoiled the whole mess. So I ended up having to re-hand-wash every diaper, sock, and shirt before I could restart the machine wash. This is me sighing:

huhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

So I now have blisters on my fingertips and knuckles.

Still, we’re better off than a lot of people. I see neighbors hanging their clothes to dry on chain link fences and rocks. One woman doesn’t even have a fancy washboard sink like we have; she has a big rock. I see her using it. And when Hernan was a kid, my mother-in-law did all the washing down at the lake.

Now that I’ve shared my exciting laundry story, I have to go check the machine to see if it’s ready for it’s jumpstart.

Sometimes I like that I have to restart the machine. It gives me a good reason to punch something.
(I would add a cutesy smiley face here, so you'd know I'm saying this with a sense of humor and am not about to angrily beat on a defenseless and feeble washing machine, but I'm too embarrassed to be caught both blogging and using smiley faces at the same time. So thar ya go.)

Busy With Baby

Spit-up is the new number one fashion accessory. Wear it in a big splotch on the front of your shirt, or dribbled across your shoulder. The daring are even wearing it in their hair. Spit up compliments clothing of any style, but is especially trendy worn with anything that makes you look “haggard”.

I haven’t posted in a while. It’s because I got busy. Got busy having a baby and then busy trying to take care of him. He’s a demanding guy.

So I’ll see how posting continues, or doesn’t continue. It’s supposed to get easier after the first few weeks, the child rearing, that is. That’s the dirty lie they keep telling me anyway. I’m getting three or four hours of interrupted sleep a night, though last night I lucked out with a whopping five. Blogging has thus dropped below sleep on the List of Priorities (though apparently Facebook still trumps sleep…?).

I haven’t decided yet how much to write about my baby. He’s the new center of my universe, because he’s basically the greatest person ever, but I’m not so delusional that I don’t realize that not everyone agrees with me on that. I might be fascinated by his digestive troubles, but I suspect it’s not worth blogging about.

I’m not sure I can think much beyond my baby boy right now, though. I can say that’s it’s pretty sweet sleeping on my back again and being able to bend at the waist. I’m looking forward to a day when I’ll be back on my bicycle.

Oh, and my one friend I’d made down here: she’s up and moving back to the States. Damn. Back to square one, or square zero maybe. It’s ok… I’m planning on using my adorable child to lure people into conversations with me… I just have to find a shirt not covered in spit up and I’m out the door!