Originally published in the Miami News-Record on August 30, 2015
They were just cloth diapers, however we didn’t use them for
that. I bought them second-hand from my boss at the time. His boys were out of
infanthood and I was a newlywed with dreams of a family. So they were tucked
away in the spare room until the blessed event occurred.
Abby was our most prolific puker. We ran the gambit of
formulas in attempts to quell the fount of ...stuff that emitted from our baby.
Those cloths were put through their paces her first year. While the burp cloths
were ever present and actually a part of my wardrobe that first year,
(seriously, every picture of me taken during Abby’s first year shows me
sporting a cloth diaper on my left shoulder – it’s comical, really) she had no
particular attachment to them.
Then her brother came along and once again we dragged out
the burp cloths. It was a force of habit to start wearing a burp cloth on my
left shoulder even though he wasn’t the projectile spewer his sister had been.
But a funny thing happened when he wasn’t very old – we noticed that when we
picked him up, he found that ever-present cloth and grabbed it up in his tiny
little hand. He would clutch it and love on it and soon, he was our own little
Linus. We started tying a knot in the end of one so we’d know not to wipe up
slobbers, boogers, or spits with it. And it wasn’t long before it had a name: it
was The Woobie. He went to bed with it, woke up with it, drove it around in his
Tonka dump truck, and ate with it in his lap. After he was weaned off the
bottle and no longer needed a burp cloth, Woobie still hung around. He had
about three dozen to choose from and we just rotated them out when they started
smelling weird or I felt they might start standing up on its own. I mean, they
were all identical, so they were easily interchangeable.
Then SURPRISE! We found out we were going to have a Kady!
And while we tried to convince brother that the new baby was going to need the
burp cloths for actual burping, he didn’t buy it. We finally reached an
agreement – he would keep three for himself and the rest had to go to his new
sister. And because he was in the throes of stinky boy-ness, I promptly dyed
them all bright pink so he would want nothing to do with the ones he donated.
It worked. He said pink was gross.
Then a new generation of Woobie was born, all pink and
girly. It wasn’t long before we were tying a knot in the end of one to keep it
goo-free. And that sweet girl carried those pink raggedy hunks of cloth
everywhere, even more than her brother did. By the time Kady was born, those
burp cloths were in the neighborhood of 23 years old. They held up well, I
think.
Tucked safely in their keepsake boxes are many things – locks
of hair, birth announcements, etc. In Abby’s is a paci with no end (creative
habit-breaking on my part). In Sam’s is a very dingy Woobie with a knot in the
end. And in Kady’s, a tiny 4x4 piece of the palest pink, ratty, threadbare
fabric that is all that is left of the very last Woobie. Sam’s was washed
before I put it away and in my tenderest of Mommy moments, I will breathe deep
into it and reminisce of the scent of his little boy noggin. Kady’s, however,
was in such bad shape it could not be washed before it was put away. It would
have disintegrated for sure. I don’t
sniff around on that one. I think it’s better to remember the smell of her
little head without partaking of the Woobie. It’s probably just safer for my
nasal passages.
No comments:
Post a Comment