I don't normally do this on my blog but I feel the need to vent today. Two topics are on my mind this morning:
1) With seven people living here, there is no such thing as the laundry being done. Baby has discovered the joy of sippy cups and now he guzzles water all day, on top of his never-ending love of nursing, and so he's flooding his diapers. I'm constantly changing his clothes- even though I change his diaper every couple of hours, he leaks anyway. Then this morning he woke up drenched, and since we cosleep, this involves me changing the mattress pad and sheets on a king-size mattress. Plus, he wears cloth diapers which need to be washed frequently. And my other kids wear a lot of clothes. My laundry pile is currently a mountain.
2) I just made Baby's appointment for his 12 month check-up and only a nurse-practitioner we've never met was available. So I get to repeat for what feels like the zillionth time to the zillionth person not to retract his foreskin. Since Americans are generally uneducated about it, I have to educate medical professionals on the proper care of an intact penis so that they don't cause my baby unnecessary pain and trauma. I find this need for vigilance stressful and it irks me that nurses and doctors are so uninformed about this and have probably needlessly hurt other babies with intact foreskins. It loosens up over time, there is no need to retract it before it's ready, it's self-cleaning. When you force it it's like if you ripped your fingernails away from the nail bed. It hurts. And it causes adhesions to form and infection can then set in. You know all those horror stories about the uncircumcised boy who developed a horrible infection and needed to be circumcised later anyway, so you might as well do it when they're babies and won't remember? Yeah, that's an urban legend and never happens. Any infection I've heard about in an uncircumcised boy is due to retracting the foreskin before it's ready. Just leave it alone.
