The vérité of quantum diaper changes.

We are currently a two-diaper fam.

I think the point where a child is casually conversing on multiple levels about nuanced subjects with a hefty vocabulary - or at least enough to politely request a book while you’re changing them - is the point at which it feels like perhaps a more aggressive course toward diaper dependence could be considered.

I don’t know. Four kids now, and there’s still so much I don’t know, and it’s not from not trying, or not paying attention, or not listening carefully, or not being tuned in to fresh ideas, et cetera.

When it comes to life philosophies, I’m more inclined to heed the ideas of Socrates over those of Donald Trump, such as the notion of embracing all the knowledge you don’t possess while you continue to try learning, knowing it’s a Sisyphean battle and the more you know the more you’ll realize you don’t know, and that’s the way of life. The choice is not whether it’s true - it is - the choice is whether to embrace it as inevitable and thus let it inform future decision-making and maaaaybe help you keep a sense of humility, in case you ever think you’ve got things all figured out as a parent.

Sometimes changing one diaper is hard.
Sometimes changing two diapers is really hard.
We don’t have twins or triplets.
Sometimes there’s a lot of other stuff also going on simultaneously that makes it even more challenging, and it’s really, really hard sometimes to keep a balance of discipline and structure amidst chaos and joy, and I do believe in the co-mingling of all four things. It’s hard though. Diaper-changing is a proxy, or a microcosmic look at the real challenge:

multiple kids, multiple ages, multiple needs, different levels of hormones and ways of thinking and personalities and abilities and ways of connecting or conflicting with one another and us, and there’s usually not a smooth, linear, one-thing-at-a-time way to handle one micro-crisis or event at a time. So you just deal. You try to get through whatever it is that has to be done, and you try to do with a mix of effectiveness, efficiency, positive modeling, and kindness. Perhaps a little zaniness or joy too, when possible.

But sometimes it’s less of that and more a sense of everything happening at the same in a quantum sense; all kinds of things happening in slow motion and hyper speed, melodies and white noise and static and music, screaming, yelling, bickering, trying to keep waste from diapers flying around while limbs are flailing and lungs are heaving and older ones are casually asking for help with a assignment or wondering about a snack, and there’s no space left for decent decision making, so you let the river reality carry you, along with your involuntary muscles and those autonomic motor movements, and you get through, and if you remember in the moment, you try and laugh because you know it’s funny; you know it’s funny with the entire bottom of your heart and your heart’s bottom and you know you’d be rolling on the ground if you were an onlooker,

so that’s what I try to do sometimes:

imagine I’m an onlooker. Pretend I’m the audience. Why wait a decade to laugh when you can laugh at yourself now?

So I do.

I won. I won another day.