Nephew Park

By Todd Stadler · Friday, March 28, 2008 11:55pm

Do you remember Jurassic Park? The idea was that someone had perfected a technique of regenerating dinosaurs using bits of fossilized DNA. He wanted to create an island safari park where people could experience the dinosaurs up close, while of course protected from the various dangers inherent to them. And then everything went wrong and the velociraptors got out and people died and hey, that's a UNIX system.

I bring this up because Project Nephew similarly went horribly, horribly wrong. Except instead of velociraptors scurrying about, it was some sort of stomach virus. Not that the difference mattered much to those involved.

Project Nephew, for those not aware, is the name I gave to the visit from Rachel (Julia's sister) and David (her five-month-old son, my nephew). It was supposed to be a happy time. A time for cuddles and laughs. A time for us to teach David how to drink a real, Northwest-style IPA. You know, typical aunt-and-uncle stuff.

But the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, they say, end up covered in vomit, desperately wishing to fall asleep. Something like that.

It all started on Tuesday, when Rachel fell ill. I felt sorry for her, of course, as this meant not only discomfort for her, but also the canceling of social engagements. At least Julia had the week off for spring break, so there was someone to comfort Rachel and take care of David.

In fact, Julia even offered Tuesday night to feed and change David when he woke up in the middle of the night, which I much appreciated, since I was still going to work the next morning. Or so I thought, he said with no small amount of foreshadowing.

Yes, foreshadowing. For several hours before David woke up to tell us he was hungry, Julia woke up to tell me she was ... not. She communicated this, not in her usual fashion of saying to me, "Todd, I'm not very hungry," but rather with a complex system of movements that involved her jumping over me, out of bed, and down the hall, quickly, to the bathroom. There were sounds involved, as well, but these will be left as an exercise for the reader.

"The bastard viruses got Julia, too!" I might have said in an overdramatization of the week's events, shaking my fist at the sky and vowing to kill every last one of them (the fact that they are technically not alive notwithstanding).

This left me in the unique position of being the only person in the house who was (1) not ill and (2) able to feed himself and others. Which meant that, mere hours after Julia woke me up to say she felt awful, David woke me up to tell me that he also felt lousy, but for entirely different reasons.

Fortunately, David's malaise was easily dealt with (or so I foreshadowingly thought), as all I had to do was make up a bottle of his formula and sit there with him in my arms while I thought about how professional parents probably know how to choose feeding positions that don't cause various body parts to hurt and/or fall asleep.

"There! Now, that wasn't so bad was it? I just might get used to this baby thing! Middle-of-the-night feedings aren't so bad! Boy, some parents really complain for nothing!" (Let the reader understand: this is highly complex foreshadowing.)

I was even so chipper that I felt up for changing David's diaper, which was clearly soaked. (Dear reader: are you expecting the foreshadowing's antecedent to appear here? You will be disappointed.) With Julia's help (as much as she was able to offer in her virus-addled state, lying on the hallway floor, nearly passed out — and yet such was my novicehood that she was still more knowledgeable than I), I eventually wrangled David out of his clothes and diaper, and into a nice, clean, notably lighter diaper.

"There! It was a little frustrating, but I did it! I changed a diaper! I was a little slaphappy from being tired, but David found it all rather humorous, and I laughed along with him."

Then Julia said something. "Did you say something?" I asked her. "No," she said, in a way that sounded like part of a very banal conversation — unless, of course, you had been predisposed to heavy amounts of foreshadowing and were very wary at this point of unreliable narrators.

"That's odd," I thought. "If that sound didn't come from Julia, then it must have come from David. More precisely ... David's diaper!"

Yes, the little stinker (and I use that phrase in its most literal sense) decided to poop in his pristine diaper mere seconds after I put it on him. My desire to lecture him on environmental issues, however, was overcome by a much greater emotion. Namely, fear. Fear of having to change a diaper ... in that way.

I mean, it was one thing to have changed a wet diaper. That's all well and good. Who hasn't dealt with someone else's urine at one time or another?

But poop. ... Poop. ... Poop?

(On an completely unrelated note, let's have a vocabulary quiz. Do you know a more common phrase for "non-productive emesis"? I do!)

As if the prospect of a poop-filled diaper wasn't daunting (read: nauseating) enough, a pre-changing inspection revealed that David had chosen to critique my previous diaper installation, noting that the slightly loose fashion in which I'd fastened the tabs made for a less than hermetic seal around his legs. I'll let you work out how he did that.

To make an excruciatingly drawn-out story merely unbearably long, I changed a poopy diaper, and some poopy pajamas, which certainly moves me well forward in the pantheon of human achievement, I should think. And all was settled and quiet, that night.

... Except that you forgot that I still had some leftover foreshadowing! Aha!

Yes, the next morning, I, the last healthy person standing, was knocked off my feet and onto the couch. Or the futon, or any horizontal surface not previously covered with a whimpering, flu-riddled human frame.

And there we remained for two days. Four people, unable to move — three due to overpowering illness, and one because he simply hadn't learned to propel himself in a meaningful sense. Yet. (No, ignore that, that foreshadowing still points to the future.)

And then, let's see. I got better. Sorry to cut the story off like that, but there's not a lot to say about two days of groaning and consuming little but water and rice and still, somehow, having to tend to a baby somehow unaware of his fellow humans' suffering.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention, Julia and I committed to a life of abstinence.

Just kidding. But man, do I have a lot more respect for parents. It's all (relatively) fun and games with the baby ... until the viruses (or the velociraptors) come for you.