Burp Cloth

When a baby spits up it is not that quintessential picture that you have in your mind.  There is no baby propped up over your shoulder with a sweet little burp cloth.  It isn't a few pats on the back and a cute little burp followed by a little residual milk.  I suppose that's what newborn spit up is like, but 5 month old spit up is totally different.  

First off, don't bother propping the baby over your shoulder.  All she is going to do is stare at everything else around.  You can try patting her gently on the back, but really, it's not going to do anything.  So instead, you sit the baby on your lap and cover her and a portion of your lap with the burp cloth.  You resume the patting on the back.  Again, nothing happens.  Maybe this time, just this time, she doesn't need to burp?  So you remove the burp cloth and begin playing.  

It is at this very moment a belch that rivals any belch you have ever heard erupts from that tiny body.  And with it comes a river of foul spit up.  The burp cloth wouldn't have done anything, anyway, because it's projectile.  It splatters all over your pants and the couch (and the stories I could tell about my husband and the spit up on the couch!).  

If you're lucky, your baby doesn't spit up after a feeding.  This does not necessarily mean you are safe.  Time passes, a half hour, an hour, a whole nap, and you go to pick up your baby and walk to the kitchen.  And maybe that's when the gurgle and belch comes.  Once again, you are covered, and now so is the rug.  This time, there is no burp cloth to help you clean up.  When there is no cloth around you can guarantee that this is the mother of all spit ups.  It's a pool on the floor.  Maybe, just maybe, if you're lucky it landed in the fold of your shirt and not on the rug.  But you're still stuck with no burp cloth to clean it up.  So you do some crazy bent over shimmy to the location of the nearest burp cloth.  This results in a path of spit up across the floor.  

No matter what you do, there is never a burp cloth when you need it.  Steve, Kelly, and I have tried to brainstorm a few ideas to assist in this problem.  A simple solution would just be to stash one in every room in the house.  On every table, shelf, and surface you can find.  That still doesn't solve the problem if you're standing in the middle of a room with nothing near you.  In this case you would need a burp cloth suspended from the ceiling.  Kelly and I almost did this this afternoon before Steve got home with some painters tape and safety pins.  The last idea we had would be to create some kind of pacifier clip for adults so you could make sure that no matter where you go you have a burp cloth with you.  Since I haven't had to use it in a while, I'll use my school ID clip for the time being: