Be prepared is the Boy Scout motto. New parents can take a lesson from it, too.

My daughter and I were taking Link with us to an art show. She was prepping the diaper bag. I reminded her she needed an extra Onesie, which she already had packed.

“I have two diapers,” she said. “That should be enough.”

I looked at her. Without saying a word I walked to his changing table, picked up two more diapers and stuffed them in the diaper bag.

We would be gone for barely four hours, but I learned as a parent always to be prepared. Especially when it comes to babies.

Situation starts well

We had a lovely time at the art fair. We stopped in a couple of shops, and I bought Link two books (“Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” and an adorable finger puppet book about a baby dragon.)

Back at the car, as she fed him, we discussed where to change his diaper before the drive home. I suggested the front seat. We could put down his changing pad and have more space to work.

So we did.

I sat on the door frame and held him so he didn’t roll to the back of the seat. Elizabeth did the change, leaning into the car. It wasn’t a good angle to stand, but she couldn’t sit or squat, either. We joked that any neighbors watching probably wondered what in the world we were doing.

The diaper change started well, but then he started to poop. And it just kept going. He had filled the diaper she had started to take off, and it was going to start leaking. Each time she thought he was done and started to pull it away, more came out.

We did a three count, and I pulled out the soiled diaper with one hand while she placed the fresh one in position.

He continued to poop.

We laughed. We laughed so hard we cried.

I squeezed out around her to get another diaper from the back seat while she tried to use wipes to clean him up.

Then he started to pee. She was trying to hold him and keep his feet up out of the poo. He kept it off himself, but it rained down on the side of the seat before she got him covered.

Now we really wailed. We both were laughing so much, that we must have seemed deranged.

The baby just looked at us: Calm. Maybe he thought we were crazy. We certainly were making funny sounds.

Always be prepared

Finally, his activity ended, and she was able to get yet another diaper on him. We used disinfecting wipes on the seat, plastic and carpet. Fortunately, it was pee and not yellow baby poop.

I’m pretty sure she never again will assume that two diapers is enough, not when you go through two diapers at a time. Now she knows she has to always be prepared.

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How to Be a Better Writer Tip

Don’t plan everything

I am a planner. It’s my nature to think things through to a logical conclusion. I wrote about planning your topics in a previous post.

When I wrote for the newspaper, stories tended to follow a certain formula. With each story, I was trying to share important news aspects, and I needed to be creative in how I presented information. Mostly, it came down to making sure I’d covered the journalistic questions of who, what, when, where, how and why.

Column or blog writing is not the same as newspaper journalism. Column or blog readers don’t expect to get all of the news they need in the first paragraph of a story. Instead, they expect to learn something or be entertained, or both.

This post is meant as a light-hearted tale to entertain. We laughed as it happened, and my daughter joked that I had the topic for my next blog.

And so I did. It wasn’t planned, and sometimes, that’s good, too.