The Butt Saga

To Kelly: I made the announcement myself using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. The paisley is a fabric sample image I stole online from Google Images. The card design itself is heavily borrowed from another announcement I saw at Tiny Prints. The fonts were downloaded from Font Freak, a freeware/shareware font site. I made about five different designs for an announcement and chose from that selection. "Pink Paisley" was the winner.

I modified and tweaked all the images in Photoshop and put together the design in Illustrator. I used a lot of different boxes, frames and lines, and played around with color swatches until I had the balance I wanted. A dozen layers later, presto. Pink Paisley.

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Anna had her last weight check yesterday. She's now seven pounds, thirteen ounces. Terrific gain. Definitely a Super Mommy moment. Breastfeeding is obviously going well, thank goodness.

Her butt remains a problem. She still has the diaper rash she developed two days after birth. It's not really a rash. It's more like open wounds that won't heal. Two patches where the cheeks touch. No skin. Just raw, red, oozing flesh. Painful of course. Doctor says there's really nothing else we can do other than what we're already doing. It's just a matter of how much she is pooping (every 30-60 minutes). Once the skin opened up while she was on antibiotics, she's kept pooping and she hasn't had a chance to heal.

Currently, our diapering routine is this: We change her about 15 times a day. We use a squeeze bottle of warm water to clean off her bottom and a clean cotton towel to pat dry. Every change she air dries for at least five minutes. Five times a day, she stays diaper free for twenty minutes. Once she's dried for a while, we gently apply Triple Paste or Aquaphor to offer a moisture barrier.

It's starting to look like it's beginning to heal. The edges of the "rash" are turning white and changing shape a bit. But it's been three weeks, and that makes us sad.

So I'm doing the unthinkable. *I kid.* We're buying a couple packs of cloth diapers, a pail and some diaper pins. We're not switching all the way to cloth diapers, but I want to keep her in them for at least six hours a day. Hopefully that will give her butt a chance to breathe a bit more.

If we like using them, maybe we'll increase the ratio. After all, I'm home all day with the kids, and we have our own washer and dryer. If anybody has an ideal situation for using cloth diapers, it's me. (Not true. I could be incredibly wealthy and live in a city that has a diaper service.)