The Last Diaper

I'll actually miss these guys.

I cleaned my truck yesterday. I don't want anyone (especially my father in law) to think that I never clean my truck, I do. I pick up the toys that haven't made their way in and I vacuum a bit and shake off the floor mats and wipe all the plastic down with armor all. I clean it, but I don't often clean it. For about the first four years that I had the truck I always had a car seat strapped in back. Not unusual for someone with small children, but in my truck that means that I couldn't fold up my rear seats. Well, I could, but I'd have to strap and unstrap a seat just to do it. Unless I had a flat tire and I needed to get the jack out, that was a lot of work. Too much work for just cleaning, especially with all the small people that want to help me. Because of that, there was an area of my truck that didn't really get cleaned, under the back seat. Well, I'm down to only having three booster seats in the back so it's not so much of a big deal to strip everything out of the inside and really give it a good scrubbing. I found two pairs of sunglasses, a pair of gloves, seven tennis balls, four lego guys, 3 pencils, one pen, numberless goldfish crackers and one diaper, among other things. It's the diaper that made me pause. My youngest has been potty trained for over a year. I kept a few around those first few months just in case, and this is the last of them. I pitched all of the ones in the house when I cleaned up the bathroom to paint and I thought I got them all. Nope, just this one. One last diaper.
It's no secret that I really loved having babies. I never minded diapers. Even though there were so many of them, so very many, it always seemed like a minor thing. It's like someone offering you a Corvette, no, a Ferrari, with the stipulation that you have to wash it when it's dirty. The washing is minor, you might not even notice. I didn't. If it wasn't completely idiotic to have more children I would be all over it. Everyone has to look around them and set a limit sometime. With some it's only one, some make it into the teens, for us it was four. The house is full, the truck is full, the kitchen table is full. If you combine that with the fact that I have to talk another person into gestating for nine months, and then the whole birthing thing, and then breast feeding think, it's not like I can make the choice on my own. It's a team decision. Emotionally it sounds like a good idea, but intellectually, both individually and as a team, it would be idiotic.
The last diaper, the end of an era.